Pep Guardiola and Manchester City have made some diabolical transfer decisions in recent years, with Cole Palmer, Declan Rice and Kyle Walker all involved.
Manchester City are in a real state and it has been coming. Absolutely no-one noticed until now and it can only be said in retrospect but some of their transfer dealings over the past two years have been atrocious and the squad-building overseen by Guardiola was only going to lead this way.
These are some of their worst decisions over the last five transfer windows.
Not helping RodriIt is no coincidence that Manchester City’s last poor Premier League season was Rodri’s first. The Spaniard endured a tough learning curve, scoring his first goal in a 3-2 loss at Norwich, displaying his elite-level penchant for bitterness in defeat and job-sharing with Fernandinho while fast-tracking his course in The Dark Arts.
Therein lies a key point: Rodri was signed as Fernandinho’s heir but the eras overlapped. The latter handed in his notice and stayed to show the former where the mugs are kept, how to reset the computer and what to feed Scott Carson. It was a smooth handover, a natural transition.
Manchester City at their best identified and secured a player’s replacement before they even left; Rodri arrived more than five years ago and is still without even an adequate back-up.
There are sub-sections of failure which branch off into different examples of incompetence but the overall point remains more relevant than ever: Manchester City have relied on Rodri too much for too long.
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Kalvin PhillipsAttempts have been made to rectify that over-reliance but whenever Manchester City have theoretically reduced the load on Rodri, they have achieved the precise opposite. The realisation hits that his skillset is irreplicable and his flair for tactical fouls is unteachable, so his pedestal only rises.
That was most blatant in the case of Phillips. Txiki Begiristain described the midfielder as “a superb addition to our squad” who “will complement our game perfectly” when he signed but beyond a mutual love for Marcelo Bielsa, player, manager and team were laughably incompatible from the start.
The starts Manchester City trusted to Phillips tell a story: Frank Lampard’s Chelsea, Brentford on a meaningless final day, Red Star in the Champions League, Bristol City in the FA Cup and Southampton and Newcastle in the League Cup. Guardiola had little faith in the midfielder on the pitch and summarily failed to protect him off it.
In those 18 months as a hypothetical Rodri stand-in, Phillips played far more often for England and has indeed featured more prominently since on loan at West Ham and Ipswich, although even at those two temporary career stops his confidence seemed shattered by the Etihad experience.
The Declan Rice chaseAnother strand of Rodri-related amateurishness was in their doomed pursuit of Declan Rice.
While basking in the glow of their Treble in summer 2023, Manchester City waded into a potential record auction with Arsenal, presided over by West Ham. The Gunners had been criticised and mocked for tabling bids worth £80m and £90m for a player who would inevitably attract nine-figure interest and the expectation in some quarters was that the Guardiola chequebook would simplify and ultimately solve the equation.
Manchester City offered a slightly better £90m package, then withdrew from an anti-climactic race once that was rejected and Arsenal responded with a clinching £105m proposal.
It was an inadequate transfer saga, not least because Arsenal put in the groundwork while Manchester City simply tried to interject before the final handshake. Rice himself said “this project seemed more exciting” and it is understood he was swayed by the enthusiasm of Mikel Arteta and Edu Gaspar during a face-to-face meeting before he joined.
There is no guarantee it would have worked but Manchester City had every chance to do the same and chose not to.
Signing Matheus NunesPerhaps they were too busy trying to nail down a player Guardiola once described as “one of the best in the world today”.
That was the Manchester City manager at his head-patting, patronising best, praising a member of a side they had just thrashed 5-0 in the Champions League. The following year, Guardiola backtracked ever so slightly and admitted he “overexaggerated a little bit” over the nevertheless “exceptional” Nunes.
The Portuguese has actually been one of Manchester City’s better players this season but that encapsulates the drastic lowering of standards and levels. Spending £53m on a player with no real defined position in this system, who would have struggled to make the bench a couple of years ago, who actual Wolves were more than happy to let go, is a neat summary of how the Etihad’s formerly untouchable market practices have been replaced by maddening imprecision and flawed ideas.
Jeremy Doku over Cole PalmerIt is important to note that at the time, those who felt Manchester City were the foolish ones in a transfer which saw Chelsea spend £42.5m on a 21-year-old with 13 professional career starts were in the minority and called Todd Boehly.
Manchester City, if anything, were to be praised for having produced such an expensive asset from their academy. The PSR overlords thanked them for their sacrifice and everyone happily laughed at Chelsea for selling their own homegrown players just so they could afford someone else’s.
Yet it is starting to feel a bit like they were not the ones who did something maybe possibly perhaps quite stupid. It might be the 36 goals and 21 assists for Palmer in 63 Chelsea appearances; it could be the sudden and inexorable decline of Manchester City; it may be that centre-half-turned-often-flailing-left-back Josko Gvardiol is their second top scorer this season. The whole combination is starting to resemble a case of Guardiola and friends having truly f**ked it.
Palmer’s order of preferences in summer 2023 were clear: 1) stay and fight for his Manchester City place, 2) leave on loan, come back and fight for his Manchester City place, 3) have a chippy tea and 4) leave Manchester City permanently. When a temporary move was not sanctioned and Doku and Nunes joined to leap ahead in the attacking pecking order, the decision was practically made for him.
While Palmer might never have reached these heights in that environment under different circumstances at Manchester City, The Optics are uncomfortable. Since summer 2023 he has almost as many goals (36) as Doku, Savinho and Jack Grealish have combined goals and assists (37), and reigning Player of the Year Phil Foden is failing to keep up now too.
Not replacing Julian Alvarez“Maybe it’s a mistake but I like to work with not a long squad. I don’t like to leave a lot of players without playing for a long time,” said Guardiola of another perfectly cromulent transfer which has been exposed in the glare of hindsight.
It did seem a bit weird that Manchester City were selling Alvarez, but when Atletico Madrid come along with £82m for an ostensible back-up forward and Diego Simeone is pretending to cup his comically large testicles from across the negotiating table, there is only really one answer.
The problem really was in how short it left Manchester City. While the common claim was that Alvarez felt compelled to leave in search of better playing opportunities, he had more appearances than any teammate in 2023/24 while chipping in with 19 goals and 13 assists.
Many of those games were as a substitute and there was a clear lack of trust when it came to the biggest fixtures, hence Alvarez’s desire to leave, but it created an obvious gap in the squad which needed filling.
“If we have many injuries it will be a problem,” said Guardiola at the time and there need be no expansion on that point, but his citing of Oscar Bobb (excellent but untested), James McAtee (two Premier League minutes in a massively injury-hit season), Ilkay Gundogan (more goals than functioning knees) and Bernardo Silva (has clearly had enough of this nonsense and just wants to move to sodding Barcelona) as alternative options in Alvarez’s position suggested he knew full well this could be an issue from the start.
There is even a bit of the Palmers in Alvarez’s form since leaving: 12 goals and two assists to bring Atletico Madrid level on points at the summit of La Liga with a game in hand, and on course for automatic Champions League knockout qualification.
Summer 2024It deserves an entry all its own. If the key to building a championship-winning side is to refresh it regularly with requisite quality while identifying the right players to move on at the perfect time, Manchester City’s current problems can be explained with one quick glance at their summer 2024 business.
In came the obviously talented but clearly raw Savinho, followed only by the nostalgia-driven return of a hearteningly off-the-pace Gundogan. Out went Alvarez along with a number of other sales which were entirely justified but look unavoidably sub-optimal in the context of their campaign: Taylor Harwood-Bellis could have at least helped out in defence, Joao Cancelo’s standing in the squad was broken but his particular brand of versatility has not been replaced, and the money for Liam Delap was undoubtedly good but his performances for Ipswich point towards a ready-made stand-in for Erling Haaland.
Even the solitary summer contract extension handed down to Stefan Ortega looks questionable considering his trading of the gloves with Saudi target Ederson in Guardiola’s desperation just to feel something.
Begiristain’s departure and imminent changeover to Hugo Viana has only added to the sense of upheaval in the boardroom and on the pitch, while Guardiola extending his contract has somehow exacerbated the problems as he seems increasingly incapable of turning things around and Manchester City will never sack their greatest manager.
The process of systematically weakening the foundations had been in place for some time and Manchester City’s 2024 summer transfer window only expedited it. A club which once seemed to nail every key decision has mastered the art of getting every one of them wrong.
Kyle Walker’s new contractGuardiola said it “would have been a big loss” and “that’s why as a club of course we fought for him to stay with us”. So really there can be no sympathy because Manchester City helped make this mess.
Walker had a year remaining on his contract in summer 2023, having just been left out of the starting line-up for the Champions League final. There was interest from the holy trinity of Bayern Munich, Saudi Arabia and Sheffield United, talk of verbal agreements and £15m moves. It seemed certain he would leave after racking up a dozen trophies in six years.
But Guardiola, concerned about the impact on a dressing room which had already lost Gundogan and Riyad Mahrez in quick succession, pushed for Walker to stay on a three-year deal which the right-back immediately set about proving to be a quite ridiculous mistake.
There were signs last season that such a commitment was beyond a player well into his 30s whose game relies on certain physical attributes, but these past few months have been a particularly painful experience for all involved.
In the immortal words of Roy Keane: “I don’t know the guy, and I’m embarrassed for him.”
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