There is a lot going on in Manchester City’s world.
Given Pep Guardiola said that pre-season finished only after his team beat West Ham United a fortnight ago in their third league fixture, and that the real campaign starts now, with games every three days (or two, as the case may be), this is the point of the season when things will start to get tougher.
City have four home matches in the next 10 days across three competitions, signalling the start of Guardiola’s squad rotation and the returns of Rodri, Kyle Walker and John Stones, who have played little or no football since representing their countries in the European Championship final in July.
Oh, and the club’s hearing over those 115 Premier League charges for alleged financing wrongdoing starts on Monday.
Here, then, are a few things to keep tabs on.
Why any eventual punishment from the Premier League hearing may prove unsatisfactory
UK bookmakers Betfair recently published the results of a study conducted during the summer. The poll, carried out by leading market-research firm YouGov, asked 2,000 adults what they thought the punishment should be if City are found guilty at the end of their Premier League hearing over those 115 charges.
They were given a range of punishments to pick from, with a points deduction coming in at the top with 55 per cent, followed by a fine at 45 per cent, relegation on 39 per cent, and a transfer ban at 37 per cent, before you get into a Keith-from-The-Office-esque ‘Don’t know’ on six per cent and no punishment at two per cent.
With the question people were asked being what punishment should City face if they are found guilty, there are no surprises that it is actually a surprise that as many as two per cent (40 of the 2,000) said not to punish them at all. Surely, in the event of a guilty verdict for some or all of the more serious breaches, a punishment of some kind would be merited.
But things like this also raise the thought of what the reaction might be if there is no guilty verdict.
With the hearing due to start next week, we are, slowly, getting closer to a resolution and a lot of the discourse around the proceedings is that City have already committed the crimes and it is just a matter of how severe their punishment should be.
The outcome is impossible to predict — City have always maintained their innocence and privately believe they have a strong case but sports lawyers who have been following closely are still guessing, too.
There is a lot for the Premier League to prove and there is one school of thought that it will not be able to do that. Given City have been through a similar process before with UEFA, European football’s governing body, at the Court of Arbitration for Sport in 2020 and overturned the most serious punishments, this may not be the slam dunk for the Premier League that a lot of people are hoping for.
Given all the strong feelings towards City over this and other matters — just think about the anger that was directed their way last season when Everton and Nottingham Forest were deducted points — there would be an almighty backlash if the reality of the outcome does not match the expectation.
Could City use Jack Grealish the way Lee Carsley did for England?
Guardiola is not short of tactical ideas but he will have been given something new to consider during the international break.
When Jack Grealish signed from Aston Villa in the summer of 2021, it was suggested he might play as one of two central attacking midfielders. He has been used there once or twice, but it has never seemed to be anything like a genuine option for Guardiola.
But England’s interim head coach Lee Carsley played the 29-year-old there twice over the past week, including a goalscoring performance against the Republic of Ireland on Saturday, putting the idea of Grealish playing centrally for City back on the agenda.
There are several reasons it would make sense; he has a great weight of pass, he can carry the ball in tight spaces, he appreciates how to slow down and speed up City’s game, and he is defensively very switched on.
That said, they are also the things that make Grealish well-suited to the wings. Beyond that, City already have Phil Foden, Kevin De Bruyne, Bernardo Silva, Ilkay Gundogan, Mateo Kovacic and Rodri in competition for the three midfield spots.
With Grealish, Jeremy Doku and Savinho (plus Oscar Bobb, when he is back from injury in December or January), there are going to be more opportunities out wide than in the middle. Just ask Foden.
As can be seen in the graphic below, most of the chances he created last season came from the left.
Many of Grealish’s best performances at Villa came centrally but at City, it is harder to see him playing there, purely in terms of the balance of the squad.
It is something to keep an eye on for England, though, and a tactic Guardiola can keep up his sleeve.
Why the Nathan Ake injury kicks off City’s rotation season
There is good news and bad news for Guardiola as he welcomes back his players — or otherwise — from their international fixtures.
Foden returned to training this week after a non-specific illness that kept him out of two City games and then the England double-header, and Savinho was back to work with him after he missed the West Ham match. Rodri is also nearing a comeback from the hamstring injury suffered in the Euro 2024 final, and while City have won all four official matches played in the Spaniard’s absence, they are undoubtedly a better team with him in it.
But Nathan Ake looks set to miss a chunk of City’s upcoming programme after being carried off with a suspected hamstring problem of his own when playing for the Netherlands against Germany on Tuesday.
Ake has arguably been City’s most consistent defender over the past three seasons. Josko Gvardiol made headlines as an attacking left-back a few months ago and has played a deeper role following Ake’s late return from his summer holidays having played in the semi-finals at the Euros, but the Dutchman always finds his way into Guardiola’s team somewhere — a sign of his reliability and quality.
City are still pretty well stocked defensively, with Walker, Stones, Gvardiol, Rico Lewis, Manuel Akanji and Ruben Dias offering plenty of ways to field a back four, but another injury would start to stretch things.
The Champions League starts on Tuesday and the new format will probably not provide the same opportunity for a mid-December dead rubber where key players can be rested (City now have Juventus away that week and there will still be two of their eight league-phase games to come after that, including a trip to Paris Saint-Germain). There will be more emphasis than ever on rotation from game to game.
Two days after the home game against Arsenal next Sunday, City entertain Watford of the Championship in the Carabao Cup. The risk of injury across those two matches is high, so we can expect to see wholesale changes, especially with a Saturday lunchtime visit to Newcastle up next.
Some fans wondered during the international break how Guardiola would fit returning players including Foden and Rodri into a team who have been performing so well, and which ones would have to drop out, but the reality is that changes will simply have to be made game by game, for fitness reasons as much as anything else.
That is what Guardiola has been doing for years at City and, up until this point, performances have never really suffered no matter who is asked to play where.
New City signings are told not to expect to play every minute while they are in talks with the club, and Guardiola’s mantra is, basically, to shut up and get on with it when somebody is left out.
As long as they know their roles, there is not too much point in worrying about it.
(Top photo: Eddie Keogh – The FA/The FA via Getty Images)
