Club World Cup team guide – Manchester City: Wounded giants primed for a new era

New York Times

20 hours ago

The inaugural Club World Cup starts on June 14, with its 32 teams split into eight groups of four in the opening phase.
As part of our guides to the sides that will feature in the tournament, Jordan Campbell gives you the background on Manchester City.
City are no strangers to the FIFA Club World Cup. Indeed, they will arrive in the United States to take part this summer as its most recent champions, courtesy of their 2023 win over Brazilian side Fluminense.
After winning a continental treble in 2022-23 — English football's Premier League and FA Cup, then the UEFA Champions League — they beat Spain's Europa League winners Sevilla on penalties to add the UEFA Super Cup in the August, then travelled to Saudi Arabia four months later looking to make it five trophies in the calendar year.
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Their 4-0 victory in Jeddah in the final of the annual, seven-club version of the competition, now rebranded the Intercontinental Cup by football's global governing body FIFA, cemented their status as the dominant force in the sport worldwide. However, after a uniquely difficult 2024-25 season, Pep Guardiola's side are not the same force.
City did, however, find enough form down the home stretch to secure Champions League football for a 15th consecutive season. So they come into this tournament in better spirits than they might have done, but this is not a swift two-game trip like last time, where they were seeded directly into the semi-finals.
The greatly-expanded competition means City will need to play well in seven matches if they want to be crowned Club World Cup champions again on July 14.
This would usually require little explanation but from winning an unprecedented six out of seven Premier League titles between 2017 and 2024, City suffered a collapse late last year that they did not fully arrest until April.
They won just 12 out of 32 matches in all competitions between October 27 and March 30, and finished third in the Premier League on 71 points, the lowest tally of their nine-year Guardiola era.
The Spaniard attempted to reframe their late rally by saying that most champions would have plummeted to mid-table once they knew the title was gone. He also played down the prospect of a rebuild this summer but, with long-time midfield star Kevin De Bruyne leaving at age 34 after 10 years, this tournament marks the start of a new chapter.
'We're going there to win it,' said City chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak last month. 'This is the beginning of the new season, not the continuation of last season.'
City qualify as one of the three most recent winners of the UEFA Champions League.
They chased the holy grail of European football for over a decade but suffered many bruising losses in the knockout stages: a Monaco comeback in 2017, humbled by Liverpool in 2018, a dramatic defeat to Tottenham Hotspur in 2019, upset in a pandemic-enforced one-off tie by Lyon in 2020, heartbreak in the final against Chelsea in 2021, two stoppage-time goals conceded in the semi-final with Real Madrid to somehow miss out again in 2022.
It felt that the trophy was destined never to arrive at the Etihad Stadium but in 2023, City avenged that defeat to Madrid at the same semi-final stage, then beat Inter 1-0 in Istanbul thanks to a goal from Rodri.
Guardiola has evolved so often as a coach but the overarching theme of his football has been dominant positional football and intense pressing. It is a combination that slowly suffocates opposing teams, although last season they lost that grip of old, with their build-up being disrupted and their pressing game losing its edge.
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This tournament could offer an insight into Guardiola's next planned evolution. So often, other coaches have followed Guardiola's first move but it feels like he is having to adapt to the shifting sands of the Premier League. His football has been methodical and about players positioning themselves exactly where he wants them. Could we be about to see a more free-hand variation of his football?
Guardiola has remodelled football several times and has been a serial winner in all his jobs, since he first took over at Barcelona in 2008, having played for the Spanish club and then managed their B team.
But this is somewhat uncharted territory for him. He has never stayed so long at any club as he has at City, and he has never had to recover after such a tumultuous period in which his team lost their invincibility. It looked like the stress was getting to him early during City's poor run around the turn of the year but his genius has been about reinvention and driving the next evolution in the sport.
Can he do it again?
Rodri. It is tempting to choose goal-machine striker Erling Haaland but midfielder Rodri last season received the Ballon d'Or award as the game's best player worldwide over the previous 12 months, shortly after suffering an ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) knee injury that would keep him out of action until May.
If there was any doubt that he is this team's guiding star, their struggles in his long absence underlined just how pivotal he is. It is difficult to imagine City would have looked so disjointed or been so vulnerable to teams running through their midfield had the Spaniard been fit.
His vision and passing range set the tempo for the team, while his physical presence and reading of the game help City pin opponents in and prevent counter-attacks.
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At his best, Rodri plays with an aura that comes from very few opponents ever being able to get close to him. In his last couple of seasons, he started adding goals — big, important ones — to his game: a final-day equaliser against Aston Villa in 2022 to set up another Premier League title, the curling strike against Bayern Munich during their triumphant Champions League run and that side-foot finish against Inter in the final.
His return in their final home match of the season was huge news for City, who will hope that these games in the U.S. will also get him ready for when the Premier League starts again in August.
Nico O'Reilly. City's academy has been extremely productive in recent years, with Phil Foden the shining light, but Rico Lewis, James McAtee, Oscar Bobb and O'Reilly are all now established squad players.
Many more youngsters developed at City have been sold on to other clubs for seven- and eight-figure sums, such as Liam Delap and Cole Palmer, who found it difficult to earn regular minutes under Guardiola. In his 2024-25 debut season, however, O'Reilly showed he has the ability and athleticism to vault that bar.
He made his debut in the Community Shield win over Manchester United in August and went on to make 19 appearances across all competitions.
The now 20-year-old's ascension towards the first team was curtailed by an ankle injury at the start of the 2023-24 season, which kept him out for several months, but he took advantage of the absences of Nathan Ake, Manuel Akanji and John Stones in the next one.
Guardiola chose to reinvent O'Reilly, from an attacking midfielder into a left-back, due to the team's injury troubles and he put in some stellar performances, especially against Bournemouth in March when his rampaging runs set up two goals. He has a wide passing range, can dribble, tackle and score — the full package of skills — and plays with the maturity of someone much more experienced.
Blue Moon, a ballad first composed by Richard Rodgers and lyricist Lorenz Hart in 1934, is City's club anthem, though their rendition is a revved-up version perfect for the terraces. It is the song that fills the Etihad Stadium air at kick-off on a matchday and it blares out regularly during games too.
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Sung for over 30 years by City fans, folklore says it was first adopted in ironic fashion. City were not used to winning in that era and were relegated from the top flight in 1987 without a single away victory all season. Attempting to make light of their travails, it is believed some fans drew parallels with the phrase 'once in a blue moon' and sang the song.
It has stuck ever since, but the irony in 2025 is that City have barely been able to stop winning in the past decade.
Manchester United. Having been in the shadow of their hugely-successful neighbours for so long, the period of dominance they have enjoyed over the past decade is in stark contrast to the turmoil that has plagued United since Sir Alex Ferguson retired as manager in 2013.
City have flipped the fear factor that used to exist when Ferguson was in charge of United and have inflicted several embarrassing losses upon them. Since a 6-1 away win at Old Trafford in 2011, they have won Manchester derbies by a three-goal margin or more another five times.
United have still, despite their differing form, won 10 of those matches since Guardiola's summer 2016 arrival, including the 2023-24 FA Cup final.
It is why City's fans are revelling in the current struggles of their rivals. On the final day of last season away to Fulham, a new chant parodying a popular modern United song was heard: 'Ruben Amorim… they're never gonna win again… they're crying in the Stretford End… the Reds are going down…'.
If you are the sort of person who watches the first two Rocky movies and finds themselves rooting for Apollo Creed, then you are going to love City's Club World Cup group. Up against the third-best team from Morocco last season, Wydad AC, and United Arab Emirates' fifth-strongest force for the same campaign, Al Ain, there are plenty of Davids for Goliath fans to wish ill upon.
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Beyond the group stage, providing City navigate their way past that hazardous terrain, neutrals may find the prospect of them winning the tournament as the perfect precursor for a Premier League season in which there could be the widest number of credible title-challengers in years.
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Kelsea Petersen)