Pep Guardiola and the Manchester City rebuild that has echoes of summer 2017

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It is summer 2017 and, at the end of Pep Guardiola’s first season in English football with Manchester City, the club are getting rid of players not suited to his style of football.

Wilfried Bony, Kelechi Iheanacho, Samir Nasri, Aleksandar Kolarov and Nolito are sold. Fernando, Gael Clichy, Bacary Sagna, Willy Caballero, Pablo Zabaleta and Jesus Navas are released. Joe Hart is sent out on loan for the final year of his contract. Only Yaya Toure’s deal is extended.

They are the right calls, but leave City with the bulk of an entire squad to rebuild.

Fortunately, the engine room at City Football Group had been working on a solution.

Firstly, based on more than 100,000 playing careers, they looked at how the maturity and decline manifests itself in each position.

As all types of teams can win in a one-off season, they analysed historical data about the age blends of the sides who have won multiple competitions in multiple years.

This allowed them to estimate the optimal spread of talent to create a team that could win both now, and in the future. The club were then able to create a visual timeline for each position of the team that placed each squad member at one of the four stages of the career life cycle.

The aim is to have two-thirds of the squad in the main two phases, and never to have two players in the same position at the same stage of their career.

Mikel Arteta — then Guardiola’s assistant, now manager of title rivals Arsenal — learned about the work that had been done in the club’s analytics department on the type of age and profile blends which tend to establish periods of sustained dominance.

Over the next four years, City’s squad gradually morphed into almost the perfect example of balance.

Arteta championed this approach and helped convince Guardiola to let it inform City’s transfer policy. It was a cornerstone that became a key unifying moment at the club and coincided with an unparalleled era of dominance, including a 100-point season in 2017-18, a historic treble of Premier League, FA Cup and Champions League in 2022-23 and four domestic titles in a row from 2021-22.

Guardiola in 2017, after overseeing a considerable rebuild at City (Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images)

That same summer saw the arrivals of Ederson, Benjamin Mendy, Kyle Walker, Danilo and Bernardo Silva, adding to John Stones, Ilkay Gundogan, Leroy Sane and Gabriel Jesus, who were signed in Guardiola’s first transfer window as City manager. Aymeric Laporte followed in January 2018.

Suddenly, City’s average age had dropped from 26.5 to 25 and they had a squad stocked with hybrid players who could be deployed in multiple roles. Every position on the pitch had a defined life cycle and the calculation was how to ensure that City had the right proportion of players at each development stage — not too much inexperience, nor too many who were in the twilight of their careers.

City were able to roll with the core of that squad throughout their remarkable run of six Premier League titles in seven seasons but the plan was that they would continually refresh their personnel from year to year, rather than ever again arrive at another summer 2017-style cliff edge.

But this season’s collapse in form between November and March, which left City having to scramble in the spring to finish just fourth, with only 71 points, showed they had not acted quickly enough. Chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak conceded as much at the end of the domestic campaign, saying they should have been “more aggressive” in making the necessary changes last summer.

“Normally, we like to do our business in the summer and only in case of emergency,  special need that comes up, do we actually go and do business in January,” he said. “That’s been our modus operandi for the last seven or eight years. But this January, we had to act.”

City’s winter-window additions of Omar Marmoush (then 25, now 26), Nico Gonzalez (23), Abdukodir Khusanov (then 20, now 21) and Vitor Reis (19) kickstarted the process.

Of City’s January incomings, Omar Marmoush has settled fastest (Stu Forster/Getty Images)

If those signings are looked at in conjunction with this week’s signings of Rayan Ait-Nouri (24), Tijjani Riejnders (26) and Rayan Cherki (21) — and with City also beating Arsenal and Aston Villa to the signing of Rosenborg’s 18-year-old midfielder Sverre Nypan — it is mirroring the rebuild of Guardiola’s first incarnation eight years ago.

The average age of City’s squad has come down considerably and they have added dynamism throughout in light of the team’s pressing falling off dramatically this season — part of why Kevin De Bruyne, who turns 34 in a couple of weeks, has been allowed to leave at the end of his contract.

After the final day of the domestic season, Guardiola had tempered the prospect of a summer rebuild due to the majority of his squad being under contract.

Only Scott Carson, the almost-never-used 39-year-old third goalkeeper, and De Bruyne were on deals that expired this summer so, with almost-never-used 33-year-old reserve keeper Marcus Bettinelli joining from Chelsea to make it four incomings, more players will need to be sold or loaned out if Guardiola is to end up with the smaller squad he is demanding.

Across the Spaniard’s nine-year tenure, City have used the fewest number of players, or been among the bottom five in that regard, in the Premier League in most seasons other than 2024-25, when the increase was mostly owing to a rise in injuries. This has meant they have been able to condense the proportion of their wage budget into a core group of elite players and then use their renowned youth academy to pad out the squad as an effective spread of resources.

There may still be a couple more additions before the September 1 transfer deadline because, after only the second trophyless season of his 16-year managerial career, Guardiola is facing a challenge he has never encountered before.

He has built dominant teams at Barcelona, Bayern Munich and City, but he has never experienced what it is like to be on top, fall off the pedestal and have to build a side back up again, something Sir Alex Ferguson did several times in his 26 years as manager across town at Manchester United.

Rayan Cherki’s arrival bolsters Guardiola’s creative options (Olivier Chassignole/AFP via Getty Images)

Having stepped down at Barcelona in summer 2012 after losing the La Liga title Barca had won for the previous three seasons to Jose Mourinho-led Real Madrid, Guardiola has never had the chance to show that he can re-establish absolute superiority like that. Can he recapture the sheen of invincibility City possessed for so long under him? Can he reimagine the way his teams play the game one final time?

In a sign of Guardiola’s determination to bounce back, he has also shaken up his backroom staff in an attempt to ensure he remains challenged by his colleagues and can continue to innovate.

First-team coaches Juanma Lillo and Inigo Dominguez did not have their contracts renewed, and set-piece coach Carlos Vicens has left to take his first managerial job with Portuguese club Braga — although he was offered the chance to stay. Guardiola has also hired Pep Lijnders, who was Jurgen Klopp’s right-hand man for his final five years at City’s then main rivals Liverpool, and the same club’s long-serving analyst James French, who will replace Vicens as set-piece coach.

How will all this churn, on and off the field, manifest itself in the next evolution of the team?

Lijnders is a strong proponent of the gegenpressing that became synonymous with Klopp, and in a phone conversation before the Dutchman agreed to join his staff, he and Guardiola discussed their footballing principles and how they would collaborate on the training pitch.

It is a fusion that could offer up some interesting tactical changes, with City now in possession of small-space, technical players such as Cherki but also having the athleticism and directness of Ait-Nouri and Reijnders to play through the opposition press.

Tijjani Riejnders will form part of City’s new-look midfield (Marco Luzzani/Getty Images)

Importantly, all the new coaches are on board in time for the looming Club World Cup, as are those new players.

It all represents a strong start for City’s new director of football Hugo Viana, who has been supported by outgoing predecessor Txiki Begiristain staying on until after this summer’s tournament in the United States to try to ensure a smooth transition.

It has been a summer of change, and things feel fresher at City now. Defender Manuel Akanji has admitted he would rather be on a beach somewhere recharging the batteries rather than playing in another physically demanding competition in the heat of summer, beginning on Wednesday against Moroccan side Wydad in Philadelphia, but for City, this revamped and expanded Club World Cup is of major importance.

Internally at the club, there is a major focus on success in it, because the financial rewards are so great — if they win all seven games on the way to lifting the trophy, City would bank around £97million ($131m).

But it could also be the perfect springboard, preventing the club’s first trophyless season since Guardiola’s 2016-17 debut year.

For four months in the middle of their domestic campaign, City’s football was so different to the machine-like precision we came to expect from them in their years as serial winners under Guardiola.

Restoring them to the top of English football is the task that lies ahead for him — in what’s shaping up to arguably be the most competitive Premier League of all time.

If Guardiola is able to regenerate and reimagine City after enduring the first truly vulnerable period of his coaching career, it would surely be his crowning achievement.

(Top photo: Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)

This news was originally published on this post .

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