BRIGHTON V CITY ‘City will be right up there challenging’

‘HUMBLE’ Pep Guardiola will learn from his testing experiences of last season.

The City boss arrived in the Premier League last summer hailed as the finest coach in the world following his success at Barcelona and Bayern Munich.

But he failed to land any silverware in his first season in England as the Blues trailed Chelsea and Tottenham in the Premier League.

City open Guardiola’s second campaign in Brighton this evening and Seagulls boss Chris Hughton says the Spaniard will put City in with a shout of the title.

“He’s learning all the time and I don’t think anybody can dispute what a brilliant manager he is,” he said.

“But he’s also very humble about himself, he’s also still learning the country and Premier League, and hence that’s why he’s brought in the level of players he has.

“It’s to try to put them in a better position to win the title.

“I think Manchester City be right up there challenging for the title.

“Manchester United, of course, and Chelsea will be right up there.

“But with the quality City have got I would expect them to be very strong title contenders.”

Hughton insists Brighton will hold their own despite their financial disadvantage.

“Given the transfers, I think what you do is you try to assess almost a middle market,” he added. PEP Guardiola insists football’s spending has reached unsustainable levels – even as he bids to take City’s summer outlay to £300m.

Guardiola has already brought in £220m-worth of new recruits during this transfer window – and still hopes to sign Alexis Sanchez and a centre back before the end of the month.

But he claims there will be no repeat of his drastic overhaul this summer – insisting an unprecedented churn of players was required to turn City into title contenders for years to come.

“I think it is unsustainable,” he said. “Sooner or later it’s going to finish.

“Hopefully, next season I will be here and we are not going to spend how we spent this season. Six players were out of contract. In the last six or seven years City didn’t buy fullbacks.

“We didn’t have full-backs and you have to buy full-backs. We bought three and the market is so demanding for all the teams, not just Manchester City.

“In the next three or four years Manchester City will buy one, two, maybe three players. But not what happened this summer.

“We needed to do that because it was one of the oldest teams in Europe not just the Premier League and we need to change

it. “But the solution is not changing players every season.” Guardiola hopes the arrivals of Ederson Moraes, Kyle Walker, Benjamin Mendy, Danilo and Bernardo Silva will transform a team who finished 15 points adrift of Pep Guardiola champions Chelsea last season.

He believes he still needs to add to his strike force, with Sanchez and Monaco’s Kylian Mbappe targeted all summer.

“The group of players this season are going to stay here for a long time,” he added. “We will change one important player, it depends on who is going to stay.”

Guardiola is also convinced City saved a fortune by doing much of their business early.

He said: “We tried to make it a young squad and we did it earlier, and we are lucky because it would be more expensive now in the last weeks.

“The club was clever like that because we anticipated what we needed after last season.

“We made good things last season with the players we had, but all together we were unable to achieve what we were looking for.

“Top teams all around the world are always looking for the best as possible but we had one of the oldest teams in the Premier League so we decided to bring in energy. Our average age is 24, so it means a lot for the future of the club.”