Enzo Maresca's Tough Start at Manchester City

Enzo Maresca could hardly have asked for a harsher introduction. Yes, it was “only” the Community Shield. Yes, history says nobody has paraded that trophy in August and gone on to win the league since 2018. But strip away the caveats and what remained at Wembley was stark: Manchester City, under their new manager, were taken apart 3-0 by Arsenal and looked alarmingly vulnerable while it was happening.

Replacing Pep Guardiola was always going to feel like walking into a cathedral after the organ has stopped playing. The scale of the figure, the shadow he casts, the weight of the ideas he leaves behind – clubs across Europe have discovered how brutal that handover can be. With City, the problem runs even deeper. Guardiola’s football is so specific, so finely tuned, that stepping in after him is not just about personality, it is about architecture.

Maresca, of all people, knew the blueprint. He was on Guardiola’s staff in 2022-23, steeped in the positional play, the rotations, the rest-defence structures. His own football borrows heavily from that model. But it is not a carbon copy, and Guardiola himself never stopped tweaking and reinventing. On this evidence, the transition is nowhere near complete – and City are paying for it.

Arsenal exposed them. Mikel Arteta’s side were sharp, clean in possession, and far more cohesive than they had often been even on their way to last season’s title. Any suggestion that ending a 22-year wait for the league might dull their hunger felt premature as they zipped the ball around and hunted in packs. The caveat, again, is that far sterner examinations await across a long season. Still, compared with City’s disjointed mess, they looked like a team that knows exactly what it is.

City, by contrast, were a jumble. Blunt in attack. Chaotic at the back. The second goal captured the malaise in one grim little tableau.

Martin Ødegaard, unhurried and unbothered, took his time to weigh up a cross. Christos Tzolis simply drifted off the back of Abdukodir Khusanov, who lost him completely. Kai Havertz peeled away from Rúben Dias with the kind of ease that will have infuriated Maresca on the touchline. The ball arrived, the marking vanished, the net bulged.

Khusanov at least had the mitigation of being out of position. Right-back is not his natural role, although he has filled in there before. Even so, no defender at this level should be surprised when a wide player ghosts off their shoulder. Call it pre-season rust, call it a lack of concentration, but it was the sort of error that turns a coach’s stomach. And it was not an isolated lapse. Across the 90 minutes, City were half a stride slower, half a thought behind Arsenal in almost every department.

If City harbour serious title ambitions, that is a dangerous way to start. They can argue that rhythm will come, that patterns will bed in, that legs will sharpen. But how far might Arsenal have surged ahead by the time City finally click – if they do?

The problems down that flank were not just about one defender. Structurally, the right side looked broken. Antoine Semenyo barely left a fingerprint on the game, offering little protection or outlet. Inside him, Elliot Anderson, stationed on the right of the midfield two, could not stem Riccardo Calafiori’s surges from left-back. The Italian scored the opener and his aggressive run helped carve out the third. An attacking full-back, even one licensed to drift infield as freely as Calafiori, should not be allowed to run riot in that fashion.

Everything kept looping back to the same issue: midfield.

Rodri sat on the bench as an unused substitute, his future the subject of active negotiations and, by Sunday night, an accepted bid from Barcelona. City are not just losing their best midfielder. They are losing the man who organises, who senses danger early, who plugs the gaps before anyone else has even seen them. You do not simply swap that out.

Maresca and City had looked to Enzo Fernández, a player the coach knows well from Chelsea, as a potential replacement. But when Chelsea set a Friday 5pm deadline for offers, City never put one on the table. Mateo Kovacic, who often covered for Rodri last season, turns 33 this campaign. He can still contribute, but he is not a long-term anchor for a side trying to dominate seasons, not just matches. Add the departure of Bernardo Silva to the equation and the heart of City’s team suddenly looks worryingly hollow.

Across the squad, the sense of depletion is hard to ignore. Dias and Marc Guéhi are the only defenders over the age of 25. Experience at the back is thin. Higher up the pitch, City are rich in attacking midfielders but light at centre-forward. Omar Marmoush has yet to convince as a reliable deputy to Erling Haaland, and nothing at Wembley shifted that perception.

The £200m spree in January 2025 was supposed to reset the project, to freshen the core and halt the slide. Yet the players signed then – Marmoush, Khusanov, Vitor Reis, Nico González – do not feel indispensable now. If they left tomorrow, would City’s prospects dramatically change? It is a question that would once have been unthinkable for a club that used to hit almost every transfer with ruthless precision.

Now, those decisions look increasingly scattergun. Tijjani Reijnders arrived last summer for £50m and is already being nudged towards the exit. Rayan Aït-Nouri was a puzzling buy at the time and, a year on, remains exactly that: a full-back whose role and impact are still unclear.

Maresca, standing in the opposite technical area, will have seen the contrast with Arsenal and felt a knot tighten. Arteta has an embarrassment of riches in midfield, layers of depth and variety that allow him to tweak shapes and roles without losing balance. City once looked like that. Today, they look like a squad caught between eras – generously described as “in transition,” more honestly flirting with decline.

The narrative of the last couple of seasons painted Guardiola as a genius edging gently past his peak, squeezing one last charge out of a great side. The more you look back, the more another possibility emerges: perhaps it was his genius alone that kept a fading squad in the fight.

Strip away the context – the early date, the long summer tours, the transfer sagas still unresolved – and Sunday’s evidence is still unsettling. This is a brutal moment to walk into the job Maresca has taken on. Succeeding a legend is hard enough when the foundations are solid. When the squad is thinning, the midfield is in flux and the old certainties have vanished, it starts to feel like something else entirely.

He has stepped into the role he always wanted. The question now is whether this City, in this state, are still a team a new manager can lift – or one that might drag him under.