MANCHESTER, ENGLAND - JANUARY 28: Oscar Bobb of Manchester City during a training session during the UEFA Champions League 2024/25 League Phase MD8 training and press conference at Manchester City Football Academy on January 28, 2025 in Manchester, England. (Photo by Alex Livesey/Getty Images)
Manchester City missed too many players through injury last season
It hasn't taken long for the takes about Pep Guardiola the chequebook manager to come out. Manchester City spent hundreds of millions of pounds in January and are set to again in summer.
They can, of course, because their net spend has been one of the best in the Premier League for years and they will continue to generate large sums in sales. After seeing enormous benefits from a golden generation of players signed in the Guardiola years that haven't needed replacing for so long, here comes a rebuild that has been needed for some time.
And so it was decided in January, against the best wishes of the manager and the hierarchy, were that more bodies were needed immediately. They would stick to their principles of buying players for the future, but they could not ignore the fact that some readiness was required to get the club through an unprecedented injury crisis.
Hence the signings of Omar Marmoush and Nico Gonzalez as well as Abdukodir Khusanov and Vitor Reis, ready to push through as the next generation at the Etihad when the time comes. The same goes for Tijjani Reijnders, with a £46.3m deal agreed to bring the AC Milan midfielder to Manchester imminently.
Outgoing sporting director Txiki Begiristain likes to speak of a tandem for his squad renewal, wanting the successors to have some time on the back of the bike watching how it is done at the front before they then take the lead. It worked pretty well with Rodri coming while Fernandinho still had some good years in him, and the same is true of the January signings.
For all the sneers from elsewhere that Gonzalez is already being replaced by Reijnders, the reality is that they will both be expected to step up and help replace Kevin De Bruyne, Mateo Kovacic, Ilkay Gundogan and Bernardo Silva. It won't all be this summer and they will have extra bodies to help but they are already in position soaking up everything that they need.
In this transition period, even if new signings don't directly replace outgoings they will add a competition for places that was sorely lacking last season. As more and more became injured, Guardiola lamented that there was nobody to challenge their teammates for a place in the side; where previously a good performance wouldn't have been enough for someone to keep their place, last year a bad one wasn't enough to lose it.
Nathan Ake spoke of relief at breaking his foot in February because it actually forced him to sit out. He had come back too soon through injury because of the crisis and played for months with a problem simply because it wasn't enough to keep him out, but it wasn't really in the best interests of anyone.
No player wants to be forced to push through games for months on end just as the manager and fans don't want a version of the player that is nowhere near 100 per cent. If last season felt like needs must to survive, the work City have already done in the two transfer windows this summer should eradicate that.
There is still a risk of losing competition through having too big a squad, something Guardiola is adamant he will not stand for. However, as the rebuild continues at the club standards should be pushed higher from the beginning of the Club World Cup because of the freshness brought by the recent signings.
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