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In the first season after Pep Guardiola stepped down, Barcelona won the Spanish league. In the first season after Pep Guardiola moved on, Bayern Munich won the German league. So, in the first season after Pep Guardiola walked away, Manchester City will...?

Those precedents may sound positive, but the truth is that, even while mounting a Premier League title challenge last season, City ended seven points behind Arsenal, after finishing 13 behind Liverpool the year before. Guardiola departed as City’s greatest-ever manager, but also with his finest team being dismantled, a process that carried on this summer with the exits of John Stones and captain Bernardo Silva.

Enzo Maresca, an appointment that brings comparisons with Tito Vilanova – another assistant from a Champions League-winning campaign – worked as Guardiola’s assistant during the treble-winning 2022-23 season, but he now takes charge of a very different team.

Enzo Maresca has gone from being Pep Guardiola’s assistant a few years ago to the main man at City.

The Italian returns to the Etihad after calling Guardiola the best manager of the last 20 or 25 years and pointing to the struggles Manchester United and Arsenal faced after the departures of Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger respectively. His assignment is hugely demanding in one sense, though Maresca may at least take comfort from no longer having to deal with BlueCo at Chelsea.

The fact that City had to pay a £17m compensation package to appoint Maresca – six months after he left Chelsea – and that it delayed his arrival, highlighted how costly and awkward their summer has been at times. They already had a World Cup-winning captain in the squad, and Rodri appeared the natural successor to Silva as City captain, except that he is in the final year of his contract, is wanted by Real Madrid and has been the subject of a £38.4m bid from Barcelona. He may be close to leaving. That could mean City have broken the transfer record for a British player this summer and still ended up with a weaker midfield if both Silva and Rodri depart.

All of that may suggest City have less pulling power – even with players already on their books – without Guardiola. A side that looked unmistakably too old in 2024-25 could now seem young. The rebuild has been expensive, with almost £700m spent across the last four transfer windows and perhaps more to follow in the coming weeks, but it is not yet complete. Maresca has identified full-back reinforcements as a priority and, if Rodri leaves, another midfielder may be needed, with Morocco’s Ayyoub Bouaddi and Chelsea’s Enzo Fernandez both on the radar.

Rodri could be heading towards the Etihad exit door.

Still, City have begun to shape a team in Maresca’s image. The £116m move for Elliot Anderson secured their leading target, with the added satisfaction that Manchester United wanted him too. Josko Gvardiol, Abdukodir Khusanov and Phil Foden have all signed new deals; if the Manchester-born forward can rediscover the form that brought him the Footballer of the Year award and 27 goals in 2023-24, it would represent a major success for Maresca, although Foden ended last season without scoring in 29 matches and lost his place to Rayan Cherki.

City’s reshaping of the squad has left them stronger in some departments than in others. With Gvardiol and Khusanov, along with Marc Guehi and Ruben Dias, they possess four high-class centre-backs, raising the option that either the Croatian or the Uzbek could be used out wide. Gianluigi Donnarumma established himself as the regular goalkeeper, which led to James Trafford leaving a year after returning; City’s ability to command major fees was underlined by a £45m deal.

Elsewhere, though, it will be fascinating to see whom Maresca favours. Erling Haaland’s importance is beyond question, to the extent that he scored 38 goals last season and still did not finish in the top three of City’s player-of-the-year voting. Nico O’Reilly won it; the question now is whether Maresca views him more as a left-back or as a midfielder.

How Maresca sees Nico O’Reilly will be fascinating.

Some of the signings made over the last couple of years spent much of Guardiola’s final months on the bench, including Nico Gonzalez, Tijjani Reijnders, Omar Marmoush and Savinho. In the Brazilian’s case in particular, that was because Jeremy Doku had pushed on and Antoine Semenyo had arrived.

The wider picture is that City assembled a group of very good players; but while part of the challenge is to build a team, part of the problem is that some of the men who came before them – and some of the players Maresca himself coached – were great players.

That will be a problem for the Italian: the weight of the past, whether in the shape of Guardiola himself or a serial-winning team that set standards not easily matched. In the Catalan’s final couple of years, City no longer had the consistency they had once shown. Their Champions League results also declined, with eliminations in the knockout phase play-offs and the round of 16. They kept running into Real Madrid, but they also lost to too many other sides.

Real Madrid have had Manchester City’s number in recent Champions League seasons.

Even so, they still showed real sharpness in one-off matches. Last season they completed a cup double, beating eventual champions Arsenal in the Carabao Cup final and the Chelsea side Maresca had left behind in the FA Cup final.

The Italian guided Chelsea to fourth in his only full season in charge and departed with them in fifth. His biggest achievement, like City’s in Guardiola’s farewell year, came in knockout football. Maresca won the Club World Cup with the Blues.

When he was last at City, and in a far more significant sense, they became the best team in the world. They are not that now; but as Maresca attempts to take them back to those levels, part of his task is to compete with another former Guardiola assistant in Mikel Arteta, part of it is to show he can be a worthy heir to a legend, and part of it is to avoid the fate that met David Moyes at United and Unai Emery at Arsenal.