Manchester City's tactical identity under new head coach Enzo Maresca is drawing comparisons to the club's most successful era under Pep Guardiola, with early signs suggesting a shared emphasis on exploiting wide areas through isolated wingers.
While Guardiola is often perceived as a coach wedded to one rigid system, his time at City demonstrated a willingness to adapt tactics while remaining anchored to certain core principles. Chief among these was a commitment to dominating possession, keeping the ball far from his own goal and close to the opponent's, alongside a structured approach to positioning known as positional play.
Domenec Torrent, who worked as Guardiola's assistant for many years, once described positional play as the discipline of understanding where to stand relative to teammates and opponents both when in possession and immediately after losing the ball. That second element ties into another Guardiola staple: maintaining strong defensive shape behind the play, ensuring players are positioned to snuff out counter-attacks the moment possession is lost.
One of the clearest expressions of Guardiola's methodology came in his use of wide wingers during the 2016-17 campaign, a period documented by journalist and confidant Marti Perarnau in his book The Pep Revolution. Guardiola explained the challenge of getting wingers to trust the system rather than drift inward in search of the ball.
"It's a difficult process. You can't just talk to [the wingers] and expect everything to happen," Guardiola said, according to Perarnau's account. "My first challenge is to convince [the wingers]. Just stay there on the wing, stay wide. Bide your time, be patient and your moment will come."
He went on to outline the logic behind the positioning: "Then, when you do get your chance, think about it, how many opponents am I going to have to get past?" His answer was simple — just one, provided the winger stayed disciplined out wide. "We've come up with this whole strategy so that you, the winger, only have to dribble past one man and sometimes there will be nobody in your way. On the other hand, if you stop paying attention and drift into the middle, how many will you have to get past? Four!"
That philosophy, first articulated a decade ago, appears to be resurfacing almost verbatim in Maresca's early setup at City. During pre-season, forward Antoine Semenyo emerged as one of the team's most effective performers precisely by adhering to this wide-man principle. Stationed on the flank, he was repeatedly given time and space to run directly at his marking full-back, a situation that isolates the defender in a one-on-one duel he is likely to lose.
The pattern proved fruitful in practical terms too. On multiple occasions, Semenyo's forward runs down the flank ended with him reaching the byline or the edge of the box before cutting the ball back into dangerous areas, allowing a teammate to finish into an unguarded net. One such passage of play, captured in a pre-season fixture against Atletico Madrid, showed City finding Semenyo isolated wide with substantial space before he squared the ball for a simple tap-in.
For the rest of the team, this approach simplifies decision-making. Rather than searching for complex combinations through the middle, midfielders and defenders are tasked with repeatedly funnelling the ball to the winger in that advantageous wide position, trusting the individual battle to produce a chance.
Whether this early trend from pre-season carries into competitive matches remains to be seen, but the structural resemblance to Guardiola's old approach suggests Maresca may be building his City side on similarly proven foundations, even as he puts his own stamp on the role.
Based on reporting from BBC Sport.