John Stones leaves Manchester City at the end of the season after making his mark in one of the best teams in English football
John Stones of Manchester City celebrates with the Champions League Trophy during the UEFA Champions League 2022/23 final match between FC Internazionale and Manchester City
John Stones celebrates with the Champions League trophy after starring in the final victory over Inter Milan in 2023
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There will always be a sadness for anyone discussing John Stones at Manchester City. What a player, a Rolls Royce and a dream to watch, people will say, but if only it weren't for the injuries.
Stones has been one of the outstanding central defenders and English players to grace the game and reached the point years ago where simply his presence in the team was enough to make the whole XI better. He still does that with England in an attendance record that has become as frustrating for Pep Guardiola and Blues as it has been a treat for his national team managers.
As well as being one of the longest servants in the modern era at City, and - alongside Bernardo Silva and Phil Foden - more trophies than anyone else in the club's history, Stones will always have Istanbul as his masterpiece. On the first and only night when City have won the biggest prize in European football, the centre-back stood head and shoulders above everyone else in the game with an all-action performance that saw him complete the most dribbles in a Champions League final since Lionel Messi.
It doesn't get better than that, and for Stones it didn't. The last two years have been full of mysterious injuries that left an angry player considering retirement last summer and sent him hurtling down Guardiola's pecking order to mean his departure this summer will not really impact the team.
If it is important to remember Stones in his pomp strolling majestically round the pitch, it is as significant to highlight the hidden effort behind the scenes that helped produce that. There was a reason that Guardiola announced famously in their first season together that Stones had 'more balls' than anyone in the room.
To explain the enormous success of Stones at City is to tell stories of comeback after comeback. He struggled initially as a young man being a big-money signing playing out from the back in a wobbling team, only to be a key part of the team that got 198 points over two Premier League seasons; his most iconic moment in those two years, fittingly, was a recovery to stop Liverpool from taking the lead in that high-stakes clash in January 2019 that ended up so decisive in the title race.
Then everything fell apart. The partnership with Nicolas Otamendi that had previously been brilliant turned terrible and Guardiola lost faith over the 2019/20 season as Stones saw his form leave him amid personal issues.
City were even open to selling the defender in the summer of 2020 before Eric Garcia made it clear he wanted to join Barcelona and Stones felt discarded. There is a video of the player that has recently resurfaced of him doing shuttle runs inside an empty London Stadium after playing no part in a City game at West Ham, still determined that hard work would bring rewards.
A month later, it did. Ruben Dias had been intended to be the defensive partner for Aymeric Laporte when he arrived for the 2020/21 season but one mistake too many from Laporte gave Stones his chance and he and City never looked back in a partnership that helped the Blues to win the league back from Liverpool and reach the Champions League final with a miserly defence.
(Image: PA)
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City won the league again the following year, and it was hoped that Stones would produce another glorious comeback when he was rushed back from injury to answer a right-back crisis for the semi-final against Real Madrid. It started off brilliantly, only for the move to backfire as it cost Stones the rest of the season and City suffered one of their cruellest ever defeats in the Bernabeu.
As crushing as that was, it was a major lesson for City staff. On reflection, it had been too much to ask a centre-back to simply move to right-back and expect it to be sustainable so when a teenage Rico Lewis emerged as a hybrid full-back in the second half of the 2022/23 season there were plans in place.
With Stones identified as the man to take the role to the highest level, he was put through punishing routines on the training pitch - more lonely shuttle runs - to train up the specific demands of the new role so that his body would become accustomed to it. That paid off in the most sublime fashion in Istanbul to give Stones and City a first Champions League trophy and, even better, The Treble.
"If you'd said to me that I'd be playing at City winning everything, the fans are signing your name and your song throughout the stadium to wherever you go in the world, I don't think I would have believed them," he said on announcing his farewell. "The fans mean everything to me. I hope I've made them proud, I hope that they can relate to me as a person and as a player with how I've played, how I've represented the club and will do for the rest of my life.
"All the setbacks that you have and the good things that you have came into light in that [Champions League final] game or after that game, it made it worthwhile what you have to go through that people don't necessarily see and to celebrate and do it in the fashion that we did with all my family and friends was incredible."
Horrible luck with injuries have hampered Stones in the last two seasons and contributed to that feeling of sadness with his impending departure, but that just shows how happy the highs were that the defender was able to produce. If the City great looked at easy whenever he was on the pitch, it was down to all the hard work and pain that Stones had gone through to make it happen.