Why Bernardo Silva is the ideal captain for Pep Guardiola’s new-look Manchester City

Sports

add

Changes are afoot at Manchester City this summer but the news that Bernardo Silva has become club captain shows us certain fundamentals will stay the same.

With four pre-Club World Cup signings completed in recent weeks and significant ins and outs among the backroom staff, there already feels like a new energy around the club after the disappointment of a season where they did not win a major trophy domestically or in Europe.

And in fact, even the method of choosing City’s captains hints at a fresh approach.

For years, manager Pep Guardiola has left the matter of who wears the skipper’s armband up to a vote among his players and, at times, other personnel within the first-team structure. But he has introduced another new approach this summer.

“I didn’t like what happened last season and I decided this season who will represent the team,” Guardiola said on Tuesday at his pre-match media session in Philadelphia, ahead of City’s 2-0 win against Wydad of Morocco at the Club World Cup.

Guardiola also decided weeks ago to add striker Erling Haaland to the leadership group, which seems to be at least partly motivated by developing the 24-year-old Norwegian’s off-pitch contributions, and he will be helped by more obvious leaders among the group, such as Ruben Dias and Rodri.

The main captain, though, will be Bernardo Silva, fulfilling a 2019 prophecy from Vincent Kompany, at the end of the Belgian defender’s time as City skipper.

“I say to Bernardo often, ‘You are 50 per cent clown, 50 per cent leader’,” he said at the time. “When he becomes 25 per cent clown, 75 per cent leader he will become the captain of this team.”

Six years on, that day has now arrived, with the boyish Portuguese midfielder, traditionally the butt of the dressing-room jokes, graduating to senior figure a couple of months before he turns 31.

(Stu Forster/Getty Images)

The decision has also confirmed that, despite links with a return to boyhood club Benfica or a move to Saudi Arabia’s Pro League, Bernardo will be staying at least for this season, which is the final year remaining on his current contract.

With Kyle Walker and Kevin De Bruyne leaving the club this summer, and some potential for Ederson and Ilkay Gundogan to do the same, Bernardo is one of City’s longest-serving players and somebody who knows what has made the club so formidable off the pitch over the past decade and, more importantly, on it.

There had been some City supporters, though, who had been expecting, even hoping, that he would move on this summer. To a small but vocal section of the fanbase, Bernardo and Gundogan are seen as expendable as their team head towards what is intended to be a new, vibrant era.

And so the reaction to the news that Bernardo is not just staying, but being made captain, shows there is still a discrepancy between what some City fans want and how Guardiola intends to move things forward.

“Bernardo has been an incredible figure; nine years here, no injuries, always in bad moments he made a step up, an example on the pitch, and when he has to say something to me as a manager, or the players, he says it, because it’s the best for the club,” the manager also explained on Tuesday.

Despite some unrest, Guardiola’s decision is regarded by many others as a very sensible one.

Like the vast majority of the squad, Bernardo struggled badly in the middle of the 2024-25 season — Guardiola described him as physically and emotionally “empty” recently — but as City found some stability in the Premier League campaign’s final weeks, it was the 102-time Portugal international who was usually at the core of it, put in positions by the manager where he could get on the ball and dictate the tempo — which was generally slow, steady and stable.

It was rarely pretty but it was necessary at the time, given City’s frailty over five months. And there was very obviously, considering the moves already made since, always a recognition that things would change once the domestic season was put to bed.

The new signings, particularly Rayan Cherki but also Rayan Ait-Nouri and Tijjani Reijnders, and the rather exciting additions to the backroom team — chiefly Jurgen Klopp’s former assistant at Liverpool, Pep Lijnders, and popular ex-City player Kolo Toure — suggest that things could look a lot more dynamic next season.

Between the fresh legs in midfield and Lijnders’ love of pressing and counter-pressing, City should be sufficiently more stable off the ball to allow them to take more risks with it, to make more runs in behind, for their most creative passers to try to pick out those runs.

So, just three weeks after the end of the domestic/European season, things already feel fresh and exciting.

(Michael Steele/Getty Images)

“The most important thing is how we create again our connection and vibes between all of us to go another game, know we are a good team, and compete everywhere,” Guardiola said on the final day of the Premier League season.

Whether it is footage of Lijnders on the training ground injecting some energy into sessions — something that was perceived to be missing previously — or Cherki rapping in French during his initiation, that good feeling does seem to be back.

And buoyed by the attack-minded nature of the three outfield signings and Lijnders’ role in Liverpool’s ‘rock and roll’ football, City fans are looking forward to something completely different, especially those who felt that what Guardiola was serving up had become too prosaic.

One of the most repeated theories about their 2024-25 season so far was that City’s struggles came as a result of Guardiola’s positional play being found out by more physical, dynamic opposing teams — rather than, say, a lengthy injury list that would have crippled any squad’s style, positional or otherwise.

And during their short summer break before this trip to the United States, the idea that Guardiola ruins creative players has seemingly been accepted as a universal truth — with Jack Grealish being left out of City’s 27-man Club World Cup squad, the general perception is that the Spaniard has ruined him.

Never mind the fact that nobody attempts more dribbles in Europe’s top five leagues than Grealish’s team-mate, Jeremy Doku, or that Savinho’s first season in Manchester has been characterised by his dribbling, many people seem to have decided that Grealish’s biggest problem in a City shirt has been a lack of freedom.

The notion has spread so far and wide that Reijnders was asked about the potential for his instincts to be curbed by his new manager when interviewed by a media outlet from his homeland before the Dutchman’s move from Milan was made official.

Cherki, the maverick signing from Lyon in France which has excited supporters more than anything else, also spoke this week about football these days becoming “less beautiful, fewer mistakes, but also fewer risks taken,” which prompted plenty of ‘Um, do you know who your new manager is, mate?’ remarks from the online community who have presumably forgotten how De Bruyne became one of the Premier League’s most breathtaking players under that manager.

In the same interview, the 21-year-old disclosed that Guardiola has told him, “When you have the ball (in my team), you are free”, which again suggests that overly safety-first approach from the final weeks of the domestic season was simply a belated answer to City’s unprecedented fragility, not a long-term solution.

Surely, though, the new era is not going to be fully gung-ho, involving the kind of ruthless, direct attacking play that characterised the 2017-18 team — many City fans’ favourite of the modern era.

Opponents these days simply do not allow City the kind of space necessary to play that way on a regular basis but, clearly, somewhere between those early free-flowing days of the Guardiola era and the cautious, safety-first stodge of 2024-25 there is a sweet spot, a way to carve open defences with more creativity without losing stability. In short, the way City had been doing it for years before this season left such a sour taste.

(Catherine Ivill/Getty Images)

And that is where Bernardo comes in.

Those not in favour of his promotion to the captaincy lament that his presence will result in slow football and fewer minutes for the more exciting new players, as if Guardiola’s ‘pausa’ and possession have been sacrificed at the altar so that Ljinders and Cherki can spearhead a glorious new dawn.

City’s years of dominance — including that 100-point season, two dramatic final-day title victories, De Bruyne’s feats, and two of the finest ever Premier League teams, one with Haaland, one with no striker at all — have been built on Guardiola’s principles and the players who know how to carry them out on the pitch.

There is probably nobody in the squad at the moment who understands what Guardiola wants better than Bernardo, and having already put his winter struggles behind him to help City emerge from their slump, he is surely well placed to continue growing as a new team with a new energy takes shape.

They may never again blow opponents away with the same energy displayed by that 2017-18 side, and Guardiola will probably never win over those who blame him for the approaches of teams he is not the manager of, but if City are to get back to their former glories, it will be down to this reinvention — and Bernardo will be at the heart of it.

(Top photo: Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty Images)

This news was originally published on this post .

Share on

email

Previous

trending_flat

Who are Leicester’s returning loanees and could any be first-team solutions for them next season?

Sports

Next

Slovenský reprezentant podepsal smlouvu se dvěma kluby, půl roku si nezahraje

Sports