Manchester City's Struggles Under Enzo Maresca After Guardiola
There are always caveats with the Community Shield. It is a glorified friendly, a curtain-raiser that history insists tells you nothing: no team has gone on to win the league after lifting it since 2018. Legs are heavy, minds are half on pre-season travel and half on transfer sagas. Rodri is on the brink of joining Barcelona. This is not the finished version of Manchester City.
But for Enzo Maresca, this was still a brutal way to start.
Replacing Pep Guardiola was always going to feel like walking into a cathedral and being handed a paintbrush. It is not just the trophies or the aura. It is the tactical ecosystem Guardiola built, the ultra-specific movements and automatisms that have shaped this club for eight years. Step in after that and everything you do is a comparison.
Maresca knows that world. He worked under Guardiola in 2022-23. His football draws heavily from the same playbook. But Guardiola never stopped tweaking, never stopped evolving, and this is not a simple cut-and-paste job. On Sunday, in a 3-0 defeat to Arsenal, the gap between what City were and what they are now yawned wide open.
Arsenal were sharp, hungry, crisp in their passing. The champions looked like a side that had remembered what it takes to stay on top. Any suggestion they might ease off after ending a 22-year title wait will have to be parked for now, even if far sterner challenges than this await.
City, by contrast, were a mess. Blunt in attack. Chaotic at the back. For long spells they looked like a team still trying to work out where to stand, let alone how to defend a side as slick as Mikel Arteta’s.
The second goal summed it up and will trouble Maresca most. Arsenal barely had to work for it. Martin Ødegaard was allowed to lift his head, take his time and measure a cross. Christos Tzolis simply drifted off the back of Abdukodir Khusanov. Kai Havertz then peeled away from Rúben Dias with minimal resistance.
You can make some allowances. Khusanov is not a natural right-back, although he has filled in there before. But a wide player ghosting off your shoulder is one of the oldest tricks in the book. Whether it was pre-season rust or a lapse in concentration, it was still a glaring error, and it fitted the pattern of the afternoon. City were a beat behind Arsenal all over the pitch, slower to react, less alive to danger.
If this is a title race, how far ahead will Arsenal be by the time City finally wake up – if they wake up at all?
The problems on that flank went beyond one defender. Antoine Semenyo barely influenced the game. Elliot Anderson, operating on the right of the midfield two, never got close to stemming the runs of Riccardo Calafiori. The Italian left-back, given licence to drift infield, scored the first and surged forward again in the move for the third. An attacking full-back should not be allowed to run riot like that, no matter how fluid his role.
All of it fed back into the same glaring issue: midfield.
Rodri sat on the bench, unused, as negotiations over his move to Barcelona continued. City accepted a bid for him on Sunday night. Losing his passing range will hurt. Losing his ability to organise everyone around him may hurt even more. He has been the metronome and the safety net, the one who stitched Guardiola’s structure together.
Enzo Fernández, who worked with Maresca at Chelsea, had appeared the obvious heir to that role. Chelsea, though, set a firm 5pm Friday deadline for bids. City never put one in. Mateo Kovacic covered for Rodri for much of last season, but he is 32 and cannot be the long-term answer. Add the departure of Bernardo Silva and the heart of City’s team suddenly looks dangerously hollow.
Zoom out and the squad as a whole feels thin. Dias and Marc Guéhi are the only defenders over 25. There is an abundance of attacking midfielders, but Omar Marmoush has yet to convince as a reliable deputy to Erling Haaland. The £200m splurge in January 2025 halted a slide at the time, yet many of those signings now look expendable. Marmoush, Khusanov, Vitor Reis, Nico González – none would be impossible to replace.
City, once the model of precision in the transfer market, have started to swing and miss. Tijjani Reijnders arrived last summer for £50m and is already on his way out. Rayan Aït-Nouri looked an odd fit the day he walked through the door and nothing since has shifted that perception.
Maresca will have watched Arsenal’s bench as much as their starting XI and felt the gap in resources. Arteta can shuffle his midfield almost at will, swapping profiles without losing control. City’s options, by contrast, feel patched together. Call it a squad in transition if you want to be kind. Increasingly, it looks like one edging into decline.
The narrative of the past couple of seasons framed Guardiola as a genius managing his own gradual descent, squeezing one last surge from a team past its peak. Sunday’s evidence hints at something harsher: perhaps it was only his genius that kept an ageing, unbalanced squad in the fight at all.
Strip away the caveats about timing and fitness and the picture remains stark. This is a brutal moment to follow a legend. In ideal conditions, succeeding Guardiola would be a monumental task. Right now, with Rodri leaving, midfield hollowed out and recruitment misfiring, it feels like Maresca has walked into the job at precisely the wrong time.
The question for City is no longer just whether Maresca can live up to Guardiola. It is whether this squad, as it stands, is even capable of giving him a fair chance.
