Manchester City and Pep Guardiola are not in the kind of pickle they got themselves into last season, but they are still struggling just to stay in the kind of title race they spent years and years and years dominating.
Does Guardiola have the will or the energy to see through this rebuild with a new team playing a new way? Maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t. But regardless, at some point in the future whether near or distant someone else is going to be in charge of Manchester City.
They probably won’t have a decade of Premier League experience or over 250 Premier League wins or five Premier League titles.
Following Guardiola at City appears to be a genuinely thankless task but someone will have to do it at some point. And according to the latest odds, it’s one of these lads.
7=) Roberto De Zerbi
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All went a bit wrong at Brighton in the end, didn’t it, but he certainly did enough in his short yet eventful time there to secure Knows Our League status before steering Marseille to best of the rest status in Ligue 1 last season and keeping them within a point of PSG after seven games this time around.
7=) Mikel Arteta
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Actually ticks a lot of boxes if you think about it sensibly, but let’s be honest nobody wants to think about this sensibly. The main reason this should happen is that it would be very funny and boil enough p\*ss to solve the energy crisis overnight.
7=) Zinedine Zidane
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Still seems outlandish but the idea of Real Madrid specialist Zinedine Zidane rocking up in the Barclays at Manchester City feels vaguely less implausible than him turning up anywhere else in England.
Would certainly fit City’s idea of themselves, while City now have the Guardiola-reinforced status that might appeal to the great man. And let’s not pretend that the idea of Real Madrid’s most successful player-turned-manager replacing Barcelona’s in the City hotseat wouldn’t be dripping in delicious narrative.
Still, though. Always feels like Zidane’s prominence in all these lists is far more a product of collective wishful thinking than anything else.
6) Julian Nagelsmann
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Unlike the [**other big Premier**](https://www.football365.com/news/maresca-sack-current-premier-league-bosses-dominate-next-chelsea-manager-contenders) [**League jobs**](https://www.football365.com/news/who-will-be-the-next-man-utd-manager-if-ruben-amorim-is-sacked) where Nagelsmann sits prominently in the top 10 there seems a better chance here of the timing all coming together. Guardiola is just far less likely than your Marescas or Amorims to be leaving mid-season, meaning Nagelsmann doesn’t necessarily have to sacrifice the World Cup for this job.
4=) Luis Enrique
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Luring the manager of PSG would represent something of a coup, but there’s also the valid argument that Enrique has no worlds left to conquer in Paris and may wish to once again test himself in a league with more than one decent team in it.
Obviously he’s not a crazy person, so would still want to try his hand with the team that offered the best chance of continuing the trophy-laden life to which he has become accustomed. Ergo, Man City fits.
4=) Vincent Kompany
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He’s the Knows The Club appointment, the Spoke Well, I Thought appointment, and having seen his Burnley struggles rewarded with a failing upwards to make Roberto Martinez blush he now has the Big Club credentials, too.
Fascinating in many ways that being Bayern Munich manager hasn’t really altered his chances here all that much. It’s very much swings and roundabouts, isn’t it? On the plus side, he would now come to City with big-club experience, but at the same time if he’s available then have things gone awry in Germany? Then again, a year-and-change is now about the standard length of service for any Bayern manager so maybe it all means absolutely nothing.
And that’s why he’s still right up there.
3) Pep Lijnders
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Jurgen Klopp’s former assistant sought to break out on his own as manager of Red Bull Salzburg, which did not go well. Now Pep’s assistant at City. And if nothing else, serving as assistant manager to both Klopp and Guardiola should provide a pretty decent grounding in what elite management looks like.
2) Andoni Iraola
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Has Bournemouth absolutely punching in the Premier League despite having to constantly try – and often fail – to fend off big-club interest in his players.
Feels inevitable that he too will one day go the way of Kerkez or Huijsen or the rest, and while following Guardiola at City is a daunting task for anyone it can’t be harder than trying to sort out Manchester United.
1) Michel
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Such is the nature of the modern game that Knows The Football Club can now also be Knows The Football Group. Michel had Girona on one of the least likely title bids ever seen in La Liga and ‘fading to third behind Real Madrid and Barcelona’ still represented astonishing over-achievement in 2023/24. But does all rather feel like he may have slightly missed the boat having failed to land a big job – inside or outside the Football Group – on the back of that unrepeatably stellar campaign.
Girona have subsequently reverted to the mean, finishing just a point above the bottom three last season and currently sitting within it this season. Which is no disgrace, but does, we suspect, somewhat reduce one’s chances of becoming Manchester City manager.