Jack Grealish crouches down during a warm-up session prior to a Manchester City game
Jack Grealish crouches down during a warm-up session prior to a Manchester City game
Pep Guardiola has admitted he faces a fight to keep discontent out of his Manchester City squad as speculation surrounding Jack Grealish's future intensifies, with talks anticipated to take place in the summer. The winger has been linked with a switch to Newcastle United and his old club Aston Villa.
Grealish found himself benched during the FA Cup final, further highlighting his ongoing struggle for regular play. His sole Premier League start in 2025 was against Leicester, where he netted a goal within the first two minutes.
The 29-year-old's only other appearances in the starting line-up over the past five months have been against Salford City, Leyton Orient, Real Madrid, Plymouth, and Nottingham Forest in the FA Cup. It is a huge fall from grace for the £100million man who had been a star man in City's historic Treble-winning campaign.
The season has been an unusual one for the ex-Aston Villa player, who had resolved to silence critics following a dip in form last season that resulted in him being overlooked for the England squad in the European Championship. Despite frequent injuries throughout the season, some of his sporadic appearances have been in City's most crucial matches.
However, this did not include the FA Cup final, where Grealish could only observe from the sidelines as Guardiola opted to bring on newcomer Claudio Echeverri in a bid to level the score against Crystal Palace, rather than the player who was signed for a British transfer record four years prior. With competition for a spot in the team expected to ramp up come summer, pundit and Newcastle legend Alan Shearer made waves this week by suggesting that Grealish ought to depart.
Guardiola wasn't going to get into discussions that will be held between the player's representatives and the club's recruitment team,. The City boss, however, admitted that nobody is unhappy when they don't play and that this extended to every other team, but also some City players who didn't make the FA Cup final squad at all.
"What is going to happen is going to happen. But of course they have to come back to play minutes, to start to play again, that's for sure," he told the Manchester Evening News. "But not (just) Jack. There is not one player in my locker room, and I think all the locker rooms in and around the world, that they are happy or they are not happy, or have bad faces, because players don't play. I never, never see that.
"Of course they are unsatisfied, but not just Jack. Macca and Rico were and Kova, who was a little bit injured and I didn't want to expose that. And all the players are unhappy, and they let you know that they aren't happy.
"We're in situations when the team is winning, winning, they have to figure out that everything happened, but they aren't happy. They are here to play, and they don't play, they are unsatisfied. That is a normal position in all the clubs."
The links to Newcastle have been ongoing for a while now. Chronicle Live reported back in March that Grealish was 'open' to a move to Tyneside this summer, with the player believed to be keen on linking up with Eddie Howe, who he feels could help him resurrect his career.
Grealish still has two years on his contract, however, and is on wages in excess of £300,000 a week. It makes any sort of deal complicated, and certainly for Newcastle, and former England goalkeeper Ben Foster has fired a warning to the England man that he may struggle to find a club who want to take on that responsibility.
"He's not in a great place because he's not going to get in the England squad in the summer," Foster said on his Fozcast podcast. "He'll have a whole summer to go away, and he'll be thinking about this. I guarantee this would have hurt him and this would have left a big old dent on Jack Grealish.
"I don't know where he's going to go at the start of next season. I think he's going to struggle to find a team that is going to take on that responsibility and those wages and the demands that he's going to be expecting."