Joining the City squad should be easier this year
CITY are in the market for the best players in the world to improve their team.
Their manager may balk at the idea of a Pep Guardiola player, but a lot of work from the recruiting team goes into making sure potential targets have the right mentality and attitude as well as quality to succeed under such a highlydriven coach.
As Zlatan Ibrahimovic and others have famously shown, sometimes ability will not get you everything.
However, a signing is rarely perfect and it has been particularly difficult for marquee arrivals at the Etihad in the last few years.
Not only did Riyad Mahrez have to meet the challenge of being a counterattacking player in a side that dominated possession, he also joined an attack that had plundered a record 106 Premier League goals and a record 100 points.
From being one of the undisputed stars at Leicester, the 2016 Player of the Year suddenly didn’t stand out anymore.
A similar challenge befell Rodri when he took on the mantle of the most expensive player, joining from Atletico for £62.8m in 2019.
Playing in a new league and a Guardiola team presented its own difficulties however talented the 23-year-old, but Rodri was also joining a team that had claimed 98 points to become the first side for a decade to retain the Premier League title.
As he said recently: “It is my first year [in the league], and that is always extra difficult. Coming here to a championship team that had won everything, to have the position that Fernandinho and [Ilkay] Gundogan had is not an easy task, and also a team that has lots of attacking players and not many defensive players is not easy.”
In the same way that Mahrez and Rodri have had expectations made greater for them by City’s previous success, the team’s shortcomings this season should make things easier for the next major signing through the door.
Rather than entering a dressing room that appears indestructible, the standard has fallen below perfection.
This is especially true for central defence - a priority in the transfer market. That position has let the Blues down time and again in this campaign with Aymeric Laporte injured, so there is nobody standing out that a new arrival would be critically judged against. That does not mean they will be guaranteed a starting place and competition should increase as current squad members raise their performance levels, but it should be more easily visible to see how a new signing will improve a team that hasn’t won every competition going than it is with one that has.