Manchester City spent £180m planning for the future

Today’s newsletter is a guest piece from Neel Shelat on Manchester City’s extremely active transfer window.

Neel’s work has been featured at The Blizzard, Analytics FC, and Forbes, among others. You can currently find him regularly writing at FotMob and talking on the Get Football Tactics podcast. Follow him on Twitter here, and Bluesky here.

Also this week, you can find Neel on… The Transfer Flow Podcast! He’ll be on with Pat later today, so be sure to check that out.

Manchester City spent about £180m on five senior signings over the last month, marking the second-highest mid-season transfer window outlay of all time (behind none other than Chelsea). On the surface, this might seem a desperate attempt to salvage what has been a shocking season so far by the club’s lofty standards, but there is much more to it.

All being well, the majority of Manchester City’s signings will have a bigger role to play in the long run than this season. Rodri’s absence would be a simplistic (though not inaccurate) explanation of their dramatic downturn in form over the last few months, but the underlying issue it has exposed is the English champions’ questionable recent squad building.

The average age of City’s squad going into this season was 27.7 — the highest it has ever been under Emirati ownership. Worse yet, the overwhelming majority of their players are either in the second half of their careers or in one of the earlier stages. In fact, only three of their players were in the 25-28 age range before the winter window. Their signings in the last couple of years such as 33-year-old İlkay Gündoğan, now-30-year Mateo Kovačić, then-21-year-old Jérémy Doku and 20-year-old Savinho certainly did not help in this respect.

Besides age dynamics, City had a couple of other issues in their squad in terms of depth and certain player profiles. So, a mid-season splurge always looked likely after their results column started turning red.

Instant impact: Omar Marmoush

26-year-old forward Omar Marmoush was the headline signing of the winter in the English Premier League. His was the second-most expensive transfer of the window after Jhon Durán’s move to Al Nassr. There unquestionably is an element of inflation in the near-£60m transfer fee that Eintracht Frankfurt earned, but that is simply inevitable in a mid-season move for a player in the form of his life.

Marmoush registered 33 goal involvements across all competitions in the first half of the campaign, building dramatically from a 17-goal 2023/24 season. Before moving to Frankfurt, though, he had never even broken into double digits in any of his senior seasons. Dino Toppmöller certainly got the best out of the 25-year-old forward in his very transition-based system, but as Kim wrote last month, that did leave us all wondering how exactly he’d fit into Pep Guardiola’s side.

The Egyptian international’s versatility in being able to play all four forward positions did not make things any clearer, but his most recent role obviously was a big hint. In Germany this season, Marmoush operated in an extremely fluid front two with Hugo Ekitiké in which he was given the license to drift around to all parts of the pitch in the opposition half. However, he dealt the vast majority of his damage from the central areas – obviously in terms of shots but also key passes.

The above viz indicates a slight right-side bias as Marmoush started on the right of Frankfurt’s front two, but that will change in Manchester. On the evidence of his two appearances so far, it looks like Guardiola wants to use him as something of a left-leaning second striker (since Erling Haaland favours the right channel).

Much has been said of the Premier League’s recent shift to a more direct tactical meta away from the Guardiolan paradigm, but as ever, the ex-Barcelona tactician is not keen to be left behind with his old ways. He is perhaps more willing than ever now to lean into attacking transitions at least, as evidenced in City’s recent 3-1 win over Chelsea. Marmoush is set to be a key figure in this respect as his job will be to provide a consistent off-ball threat around Erling Haaland, who should be glad to get some much-needed support.

Of course, Marmoush could well go on to enjoy successful seasons with City in the next few years, but his immediate task is to revitalise their attack. Based on what I’ve seen so far, I’d back him to do just that.

Centre-backs for the future: Abdukodir Khusanov, Vitor Reis and Juma Bah

Manchester City’s biggest problem this season is not that they aren’t scoring enough but that they are conceding far too many goals, so heavy investment in the defensive department was to be expected. Interestingly, they have signed three centre-backs between the ages of 18 and 20 rather than seeking a more immediate solution in the position.

All things considered, this makes total sense. Between Rúben Dias, John Stones, Manuel Akanji and Nathan Aké, they have decent depth at the heart of their defence for this season, but there are openings in the long term since the Portuguese international is the only one of the quarter who is less than 29 years old. The other three have also had a fair few injury issues of late, which is why academy youngster Jahmai Simpson-Pusey had to be drafted into the line-up for a few matches earlier this season.

That, I believe, explains why City were willing to pay the mid-season premium to bring Abdukodir Khusanov in right now. The other two centre-backs certainly are ones for the future, but the Uzbek youngster is more of a hybrid signing in the sense that he could also have a role to play this term. Of course, he has already made his debut after being thrown into the deep end against Chelsea.

Khusanov unquestionably is capable of significantly better performances than the one he delivered against the Blues. He already has about three years of experience at the senior level having started out with Belarusian side Energetik-BGU in 2022 before moving to Lens in id-2023. While he took some time to break into the Ligue 1 side’s first-choice XI, he grew into a real leader for his national teams as they made their Olympic debut last summer and are currently gunning for their first-ever World Cup qualification.

The Uzbek defender has a good deal to polish in his defensive game as he can tend to be a bit erratic at times and get caught out of position or wrong-footed. However, he does not get exposed too often since he has the pace and physicality to make up for a good chunk of his mistakes. His passing-under-pressure numbers are very impressive as well, so it is quite easy to envision him developing into a top-class centre-back under Guardiola.

Vitor Reis definitely is not a panic buy and is quite likely a signing City have been plotting for a while. The teenager impressed quietly and consistently for a Palmeiras side in which Endrick stole most of the headlines, so all parties should be happy with the £30m transfer fee City paid for him. He already is quite strong in individual defensive duels, and while his on-ball numbers aren’t outstanding, I have to say I was pretty impressed by his execution with both feet whenever I watched him. Again, it’s quite likely that he’ll grow into an excellently well-rounded central defender in the next few years.

I must confess that I have not watched a great deal of Juma Bah, the 18-year-old Sierra Leonean defender who left Real Valladolid in controversial fashion. He was instantly loaned off to Lens after signing for City, so it remains to be seen whether he’ll ever spend a season at the Etihad Stadium or just get shuffled around. Either way, it is interesting to note that he was above the 90th percentile in aerial duelling stats before leaving La Liga. Clearly, City believe that English and European football is headed in a direction where dominant duel-winning centre-backs are essential for success at the highest level.

Plugging the big hole: Nico González

Everyone and their dog could have told you that Manchester City most desperately needed to sign a defensive midfielder in this window, so I was pretty surprised that they waited until deadline day to bring in Nico González. It is possible they were exploring other options because I’m not entirely convinced that this is the best move they could have made.

For one, I think £50m is an overpay for the Spanish midfielder. That is fairly close to twice his Transfermarkt value, and something close to that amount might have been better spent on another player in that position. The reason I say that is because he neither is a like-for-like replacement for Rodri (profile-wise) nor addresses the biggest weakness in Manchester City’s current midfield.

After coming through La Masia, González has spent a season at Barcelona, a year on loan at Valencia and about 18 months with Porto. Across those clubs, he has almost never played as a lone number six, though he did largely start as one of two deeper midfielders in a 4-4-2 or 4-2-3-1 in Portugal. In that position, he operated as what I like to call a connecting box-to-box midfielder – someone who is tidy on the ball and helps bring it up the pitch with good retention through passes, receptions and shorter carries, can offer a bit of output in the final third and is solid enough defensively.

It is now common knowledge that Rodri is individually irreplaceable, so the fact that Manchester City have not gone for a lone number six profile isn’t necessarily an issue. However, I do think they ought to try and recreate him in the aggregate to a good extent, and I’m not sure how far González gets them in that direction.

Evidently, City’s contingency plan in the event of a Rodri injury this season was to put Mateo Kovačić in his place. That looks like a pretty bad idea with the benefit of hindsight, but I can kind of see where they might have been coming from given how İlkay Gündoğan used to do such a job for them before he left for Barcelona. Kovačić has been disappointing, to say the least, but it is important to identify what exactly his biggest weaknesses are. Here are my top three:

1. Defensive transitions: Kovačić is almost as good as non-existent in such situations as almost every opponent has managed to breeze past him. This is one of the biggest causes of City’s poor defensive record.

2. Deep build-up: Kovačić does not inspire a great deal of confidence when receiving forward passes outside his box and is not even fractionally as press-resistant as Rodri is in such situations.

3. Final third output: Especially when City are able to camp in the opposition half against low blocks, Kovačić’s lack of conviction and quality in the final third gets exposed.

City should definitely have looked to address the first issue and preferably the second one as well with their signing(s). González is likely better than Kovačić in these respects, but I would be surprised if he is good enough to operate as a lone number six in the Premier League. Perhaps a González-Kovačić double pivot is the way forward, but that could throw off the overall balance of the team since City’s squad makeup almost necessitates inverting one of the back four into midfield.

In the long run, integrating González into the side when Rodri returns should be quite straightforward as he’ll then be able to play his natural box-to-box role more freely. Ironically enough, it might be that Manchester City have thought about the future too much for the one immediate-impact signing they desperately needed this winter.

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