Manchester City are ready to appoint Enzo Maresca and know him well from his previous spells at the club
Enzo Maresca
Enzo Maresca
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Manchester City have had a clearing out of staff with Pep Guardiola leaving this summer. Enzo Maresca will walk through the door to take over from the Catalan, and will need plenty of his own team to fill the holes left in the dugout by several coaches who have also departed.
There may all be significant positions to fill in the academy as well. As reported in the Manchester Evening News, there is interest in City's current Under-21s manager Ben Wilkinson that could see him depart this summer and while the players are all coached in the City way it would still be another recruitment process that the club need to get right.
Fortunately for them, the arrival of Maresca gives them all the advertising they need. What better motivation could you want as a coach with the biggest ambitions than seeing how just one year with City's academy could land you the to job at the Etihad in the foreseeable future?
As much as the City project for the last 15 years has been geared towards Guardiola, the leading man has been the figurehead for an enormous organisation that loves when their dots join up. The club have monitored coaches with the City Football Group in case they could have an internal successor when Guardiola did leave, and in Maresca they essentially have that.
When the Italian came to the club's academy in 2020, he made no secret about the fact that one of the big draws was getting to learn from Guardiola. He had been a first-team assistant before at West Ham so this was a coach taking an opportunity in youth football to further his career rather than somebody who expected to stay in academies forever.
City did not mind that of course because Maresca did a phenomenal job in the year he was at the club, helping to develop talent that has served the first team and also made the club more than £100m. Such was the impression he made that when he left after a year to take charge of a senior team and was then sacked (at Parma) after a few months, he was welcomed back to City and joined Guardiola's backroom staff for the Treble year.
Again, he only stayed for a year before moving onto Leicester and then Chelsea. City do not expect his third involvement at the Etihad to be so brief with time and patience given to lead a team that won two trophies in the last season into their latest successful chapter.
Maresca is seen as one of the leading coaches, yet he is not so specialist that his story cannot be replicated. Brian Barry-Murphy took over the City Under-21 job from him and got Cardiff promoted from League One last year in his first full season of coaching after his departure, and there are several clubs that think Wilkinson can help them.
As much as it may feel like Maresca has to encounter a lot of change at the club then, his arrival makes City's academy even more attractive as an option for ambitious coaches. If the club do have to make an appointment this summer, they can show a pathway that goes all the way to the top.