Pep Guardiola has spent £158m on his rearguard but not bought a centre-back and a shortage in that position could be exposed by Liverpool, which would augur badly for the seasonDespite a £226m summer transfer splurge, Manchester City are still vulnerable in central defence as Pep Guardiola’s team welcome Liverpool for the early kick‑off on Saturday. Premier League hostilities resume at the Etihad Stadium after the international break against a Jürgen Klopp swarm‑and‑attack unit that should offer a gauge of how City’s failure to strengthen at centre-back may affect their season.Vincent Kompany, John Stones and Nicolás Otamendi are the manager’s leading players in the position. With Guardiola now preferring to utilise a three‑man defence and wing-backs, injury or loss of form...
The transfer window has shut, the first international break is over and the real business is about to begin. Can any of Manchester City, Liverpool, Chelsea, Tottenham or Manchester United be content with the state of their squads?August never seems an entirely satisfactory month. The closing of the transfer window and the scramble for last-minute deals always seems to deflect from the matches themselves – although these days, perhaps, it is the other way round – and then just as everything is about to get going for real, just as throats have been cleared and vocal cords are warmed up, everybody dashes off to play a series of internationals that, in the year before the World Cup, contrive to be...
In an exclusive extract from his new book, Darius Vassell recalls his incredible season with Turkish side Ankaragucu, which involved a remarkable welcome, several broken promises and a truly bizarre pre-match ritualI didn’t want to become a journeyman footballer. Aston Villa was the only club I’d ever wanted to play for and I’d grown to love Manchester City, but I just didn’t want to go through all of that again in England; I wanted something new, something completely different. I knew that there was nothing right for me in England and I told my agent that a move abroad was the only option. I was capable of living abroad, learning a new language and adapting to a new culture, so...
The fees being paid now are eye‑watering, the wages are unthinkable, the top agents’ fees – often payable to their bases in tax havens – difficult to accept, but most clubs are in fact living within their outsized meansOne way to contemplate the mind-boggling millions Premier League clubs have spent signing footballers in this record-breaking transfer window is to reach for the handy device of the illustrated dictionary. Look up the word inflation now, and it gives you a picture of Kyle Walker. Amid the maelstrom of arrivals and departures as the clubs have repeatedly dipped into their deeper money pots – leaving Paris Saint-Germain’s excesses to one side as a special case – Walker’s fee, £50m, stands as a...
Manchester City’s manager has the raw material so why is he not bringing the best out of such players rather than attempting to buy other clubs’ top performers like Alexis Sánchez?The final days and hours of the transfer window seem to be conforming to the usual pattern, the one that makes everyone wonder why, if clubs can get so much done in so short a time, they could not have compressed all their business into a few selected weeks of the close season.The possibility of Alexis Sánchez moving from Arsenal to Manchester City is one that already seems to have been around for several lifetimes and there are even claims the Arsenal players are now hoping it goes through because...