Good afternoon and welcome back to The Overlap newsletter!
Club football is finally back, as this weekend sees the first piece of silverware of the new season up for grabs. Arsenal and Manchester City go head-to-head in the Community Shield on Sunday. While it may not be the most coveted trophy in English football, the fixture offers our first real glimpse of what we can expect from the 26/27 Premier League campaign, particularly at the top end of the table.
Arsenal enter the season as reigning champions, but despite an already highly successful campaign last year, The Gunners look intent on strengthening even further. Bruno Guimarães arrived from Newcastle United for £75 million last week, adding another top-class option to an already elite midfield. Christos Tzolis has also joined from Club Brugge for £34 million, providing further depth and attacking quality to Mikel Arteta’s frontline. And the ambition doesn’t stop there. Reports suggested Arsenal were pushing hard to sign Real Madrid star Vinícius Jr. this summer. While that deal ultimately failed to materialise, the fact they were even prepared to pursue a player of his calibre underlines the level of ambition at the Emirates as Arteta’s side look to defend their title. With major changes taking place at several of their closest rivals, including Manchester United, Liverpool and Manchester City, Arsenal arguably enter the new campaign as the most settled of the Premier League’s leading sides.
Manchester City, however, find themselves in a very different position. After a hugely successful ten-year era under Pep Guardiola, during which they dominated English football, Enzo Maresca now takes the reins with the task of keeping City competing on all fronts. The squad is undergoing a significant transformation too. Elliot Anderson has arrived for a staggering £116 million, while Enzo Fernández is reportedly close to joining for an even bigger £120 million fee. Meanwhile, 2024 Ballon d’Or winner Rodri could be heading for the exit, with Barcelona reportedly interested, while Bernardo Silva has already departed for Real Madrid earlier this window. With some of the biggest names of the Guardiola era moving on and a new generation arriving at the Etihad, Maresca faces one of the biggest challenges of his managerial career. Can he handle the enormous pressure that comes with succeeding one of the greatest managers in football history?
Who will win the community shield? Let us know who you think in the comments:
We’re excited to announce Stick to United with Wayne Rooney and Mark Goldbridge! A brand-new show. A brand-new partnership. Wayne Rooney and Mark Goldbridge unite for a weekly Manchester United show featuring special guests, exclusive insight and unfiltered debate. Launching 18 August on The United Stand YouTube channel, Disney+ and wherever you get your podcasts.
👉 Watch here:
Listen to the latest episode of It Was What It Was as, in part three of our Total Football series, Jonathan Wilson and Rob Draper arrive at Ajax’s golden age. They explore Johan Cruyff’s development: the precocious teenager shaped by Ajax, Vic Buckingham and Rinus Michels; a player whose extraordinary understanding of space, timing and tactics made him the ultimate expression of individuality within a system. The episode unpicks how Ajax’s 4-3-3 worked in practice. Positional rotations, an aggressive offside trap, collective pressing and the instinctive relationships built through years of playing together. Jonathan also examines the uncomfortable questions around fitness, sports science and alleged stimulant use in the era, before charting Ajax’s first European Cup triumph in 1971 and the arrival of Ștefan Kovács after Michels’ departure for Barcelona. This is the story of how a brilliant group of players, led by Cruyff, turned a tactical idea into the most influential team in European football.
Which club has won the most FA Community Shields?
Answer to follow at the end of the newsletter.
The ultimate sliding doors moment at Manchester United was revealed this week when Jose Mourinho’s Netflix documentary divulged that The Special One was in fact anointed as Sir Alex Ferguson’s replacement in 2013, not David Moyes. Though it was reported at the time, it was dismissed by Mourinho sceptics as sour grapes. But now it is clear that Sir Alex did have a succession plan in place only for Roman Abramovich to scupper it by pressuring Mourinho to return to Chelsea from Real Madrid.
It is pertinent to the Community Shield between Arsenal and Manchester City on Sunday as we are witnessing the most-seismic change in a club’s identity since Arsene Wenger left Arsenal in 2018. Everyone knows that Pep Guardiola’s departure from Manchester City is huge. The club chairman Khaldoon Al Mubarak literally built a mini stadium, redesigned a coaching infrastructure and employed directors to mimic Barcelona as closely as possible just so he could eventually recruit the best manager in the world. And when Guardiola arrived in 2016, no one expected it to be a ten-year stint. That is as close to dynasty building as it gets in the modern game, ten years now being the equivalent to twenty in the 1990s.
And so the Manchester City project, which really starts with the Abu Dhabi state takeover in 2008, reaches its most-critical inflection point since the Sheikh Mansour purchase. Not only do we have the relatively untested Enzo Maresca as the inheritor of Guardiola’s riches, the club also has the 115 charges to face. (Though the longer that goes on and the more we see of Premier League justice, I think we can safely file the prospective verdict under “severe slap on the wrist” territory.)
To stick to on-field matters, where does Maresca sit in the spectrum between Moyes and Mourinho? Moyes, a coach for whom I have immense admiration, was always an unlikely choice. The succession reasoning at the time was leaning into the Glaswegian roots, which ultimately proved to be geographical doping, to bastardise Wenger’s phrase about emotional doping. The skill-set managing Everton is only marginally related to that required for Manchester United which is why so few managers make the step up from brilliant coach of mid-sized club to super club status. See Thomas Frank, Graham Potter, Robert Martinez, Andre Villas Boas and Ruben Amorim for details. Only Mauricio Pochettino and perhaps Brendan Rodgers (there will be naysayers) have managed that leap in the last 20 years.
Maresca arguably fits that failed mould in that he did well at Leicester to win the Championship - though with parachute payments that is to be expected - before failing at Chelsea where he struggled to adapt to a big-club culture. The counter point would be that he failed to adapt to dysfunctional club culture servicing the whims of owner Behdad Eghbali and a team of disempowered underlings. To complicate the analysis, the ultimate point of breakdown came when Eghbali realised correctly that his coach was in direct negotiations with City and Maresca then manufactured a breakdown in relations to engineer an early exit.
He does have a World Club Cup and UEFA Conference League trophy to his name and he did work at City under Guardiola, both of which are upgrades on Moyes’ transition to United. Yet he also employs extreme, rigid tactics - the back four sitting on the 18-yard line regardless - which suggests a similar inflexibility that did for Amorim at United.
And he is navigating another change to Manchester City, one that is perhaps more important than the coaching role. After all, coaches come and go and can be replaced on a whim. Though inevitably we focus more on Guardiola than Sporting Director Txiki Begiristain when talking of City’s decade of dominance, it was the Basque former teammate of Pep who prepared the foundations for the Guardiola years and who sustained that success with a series of smart transfer trades over ten years. Clearly it helps to be the best-resourced club with the best manager in the world, who exudes charisma, when recruiting players and, as such, Begiristain always negotiated from a position of strength. But that said, the job he did was near faultless. And the departure of Begiristain last season and transition to Sporting Director to Hugo Viana came as City uncharacteristically faltered in the transfer market. Certainly the last few windows have not been the precision-tooled success that previous windows have been.
Tijjani Reijnders looks a mistake already and my own jury remains out on Rayan Cherki, his display against England in the third-fourth World Cup play off revealing a character flaw which doesn’t fit City’s team culture. Nico Gonzalez did not start a Premier League game between January and May and didn’t make the bench for the FA Cup final while Savinho is being primed for an exit. Viana has moved to consolidate City’s base: Josko Gvardiol, Phil Foden and Abdukodir Khusanov have signed new contracts in the past few months. Antoine Semenyo and Marc Guehi were signed to give Maresca a smoother run in to the job and Elliot Anderson has now arrived. Jeremy Doku has proved a success but Maresca inherits a squad that lost Kevin De Bruyne and Ederson last season - the latter both goalkeeper and playmaker - and now loses Bernardo Silva with Rodri likely to follow, which would be the unkindest cut of all.
The departure of a Ballon D’Or winner and the best player at the World Cup feels like a bellwether event, a sign that players no longer regard City as the strongest team in world football. It will be intriguing to see if Erling Haaland’s nine year contract signed in 2025 survives any downturn in trophy winning.
With clarity of hindsight, the departure of David Gill as executive chairman at United in 2013 was almost as important as Sir Alex’s exit. Ed Woodward, who took over, had no idea on the football side of the business, even though he had supposedly been groomed for the role. Viana is not Woodward in that he knows and understands football intimately and City are better prepared than United were for their own shifting of the tectonic plates. And yet the future remains uncertain and there are enough changing variables to suggest Maresca will struggle. Good players cover over a multitude of sins so don’t expect a dramatic decline. But the Guardiola glory years were surely peak City? An age of the ordinary and top six finishes looks likely to ensure. And no one ever adopted that as a pre-season tallying cry.
Manchester United (21).
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