Manchester City: Transfer News and Rumour Roundup 7
Manchester City signing news and rumours all in one relatively convenient place, with commentary and opinions thrown in for good measure.
I’m not quite sure what I was actually expecting from the Manchester City Cityzens weekend event to unveil new manager Pep Guardiola. We had the new badge, which wasn’t new because we’ve known about it for months and some fans, somewhere, voted on what it would look like. Apparently. Then we had the new home kits which, thank Heavens, weren’t nearly as bad as we all thought they would be, but they aren’t going to inspire a rush to upgrade.
With all this new stuff going on, it seemed only fitting for City to have a suitably cheesy announcement event day, heck make it an event weekend. Of course they would have to forgo the usual ManCity TV presenters in favour of a professional, ex-army air raid siren voice it seemed, who couldn’t pronounce new signing Ilkay Gundogan’s name properly to host the thing. For maximum embarrassment.
More important than this though was the man himself, and he turned up. Pep was clearly uncomfortable, much like the rest of us, with the whole thing, but he said all the right things in exactly the way we wanted to hear them said. Entertaining football comes before trophies, we aren’t like United bringing in Jose Mourinho and Zlatan Ibrahimovic for a win-now, implode-later atmosphere. We are building for the long run and that starts today.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Manchester City are busy registering their interest in just about every senior footballer going, and some junior ones too. In terms of major additions only Gundogan and Nolito have been added to enhance our first team, but one would expect that should increase as the Euros come to a close and Pep settles in. Perhaps the latter is even more key as, by his own admission, he hasn’t had time to get to know his players and see who’s in and out.
With that in mind, let’s have a look at the rumours flying so far this week and figure out who, if any of them, might have a good chance of helping create Pep’s revolution:
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