The season had barely finished when the call came at boardroom level to make public that Manchester City were not interested in signing Enzo Fernandez this summer. It feels fitting for a chaotic transfer window then that the Blues did exactly what they said they wouldn’t do.
On the surface, City are many people’s early winners of the transfer window and – the silliness of snap verdicts aside – it is easy to see why. They have spent more than £315m on central midfield players alone in a rebuild of a rebuild that has seen anyone not up for the fight under Enzo Maresca shipped out and sold on for profit while stellar additions have been made to a squad that won two trophies last year.
At the Etihad, there is confidence that the recruitment is good enough to expect Maresca to fight across all four competitions. With depth cited in every position despite wholesale changes in the squad, there is even an internal belief that City are in better shape for this season than they were last year.
Even if they are though, there are alarm bells as to how City ended up where they were in those frantic final weeks of the window that could spell trouble further down the line. It is hard to see how the club’s reputation for shrewd and efficient transfer business can have improved after such a messy summer.
Take the Fernandez deal: there were smirks over Chelsea’s self-imposed deadline before the season started, yet how good is calling a bluff if you end up paying more than you would have done and waiting longer? How good is bluffing yourself to knock another £10m off on the final day if it still ends up being more than the original price?
A summer that started with Maresca’s divorce from Chelsea being tougher than City expected ended up with signing a player they had said they wouldn’t for more than they could have done and later than they could have done. It was so late in fact, that there was a very real chance that it didn’t happen – especially given Chelsea could have pulled the plug as Monaco had done on Chelsea’s move for a replacement.
Fernandez followed a similar pattern to Ayyoub Bouaddi. Having been aware that Lille wanted to keep the Moroccan teenager for another year and would only countenance selling him this summer for around £85m, City waited for more than a month until after the season had started before deciding to pay what Lille wanted; all that time spent negotiating hadn’t earned any money off.
Bouaddi was one of multiple players that had been seen as a potential arrival during the summer tour in late July and early August, and the sporting director Hugo Viana’s presence in Asia – not a conducive time zone for talks with contacts in the UK and Europe – was assumed to be an indicator of that confidence. As a week went by with no progress though, that turned into a confusion that only increased after that.
It was while City were away that Barcelona’s interest in Rodri accelerated and, with fans increasingly concerned at the state of the squad, sources spoke bullishly about the Blues going above and beyond with replacements to make sure the new manager was backed. However true or not the claims were when they were made, City did not get close to making it a reality.
In the end, the club didn’t even match the one in for every out that Maresca made clear was expected in the summer to leave the new manager with just 20 senior outfield players. That is the lower limit for what the new manager wants and one fewer than Pep Guardiola had last season – before Marc Guehi and Antoine Semenyo arrived in January.
The squad is so small is in no small part because of the departures of several players who feature on an Amazon documentary that came out last August being talked up as the future of the club by the hierarchy. Nico Gonzalez, Savinho, Omar Marmoush and Tijjani Reijnders were all supposed to be part of the rebuild of the Treble squad yet have been discarded – for profit, yes, but still discarded.
That has created even more churn in a summer where they have waved goodbye to the best manager in the world after a decade of stability. Maresca was presented as the continuity candidate, yet has found the deck in front of him swept; just three players remain from the last time he was here three years ago.
City still believe they have backed Maresca – and multiple transfer records broken would point to that – and everything may become clear at the Etihad in the coming weeks as things click. It has been a bumpy summer though and it would not be a surprise if there was more friction before things settle just on account of there being so much change.
Beyond that, what is to stop clubs holding City to ransom in negotiations in the next transfer windows, or holding out until the end for a higher price? What is to stop agents of targets seeing what City have paid in wages in 2026 and demanding at least parity if they are to sanction a move?
City are still banking on a Blue future, but there have been some red flags this summer that make that riskier than it could have been.
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