Maresca agrees three-year deal to succeed Guardiola at Manchester City after a twenty-trophy decade
Manchester City have found their man for the post-Guardiola era. Enzo Maresca, who left Chelsea on New Year's Day after eighteen months that returned the Conference League and a Club World Cup, has given a verbal agreement to take over at the Etihad on a three-year contract, with Pep Guardiola set to step down at the end of this Premier League season.
Fabrizio Romano broke the news on Tuesday, reporting that the agreement is total and that the announcement will follow once Guardiola's exit is formally communicated by the club. City have not yet officially confirmed the departure, with sources still pointing to Guardiola's contract running until 2027, but the move is now expected to be made public after Sunday's final round of league fixtures.
Ten years, twenty trophies, one stoppage point
If this is indeed how the Guardiola era ends, it ends on a high. His side face Bournemouth in midweek with Arsenal two points clear at the top with two games remaining, and at Wembley on Saturday they came past Chelsea to lift the FA Cup, his third in the competition with City. The full haul across a decade at the Etihad stands at twenty: six Premier League titles, three FA Cups, five League Cups, three Community Shields, the 2022-23 Champions League and treble, the 2023 UEFA Super Cup and the 2023 Club World Cup. Only Alex Ferguson at Manchester United has produced a more decorated single-club spell in the English game.
The exit will end a coaching cycle that began in the summer of 2016 and reshaped how the Premier League thinks about pressing, possession and squad turnover. Guardiola has repeatedly said in recent months that he was happy and intended to honour his contract, but Tuesday's reporting indicates the decision is now made.
Maresca knows the building
The choice of successor is not a stretch. Maresca was on Guardiola's staff during the 2022-23 treble season as an assistant and was widely seen as one of the more tactically aligned coaches in his orbit. He left to take the Leicester job, won the Championship in his only season there, and was recruited by Chelsea in the summer of 2024.
His eighteen months at Stamford Bridge ran hot and cold. He took the side to a fourth-place finish in the Premier League in 2024-25, won the Conference League final against Real Betis, and lifted the new Club World Cup against PSG in New Jersey to become, briefly, a world-champion head coach. The 2025-26 start was the opposite: one win in seven through November and December, breakdowns with the medical staff, and an exit on New Year's Day that Chelsea framed as mutual. The club, who appointed Xabi Alonso on a four-year contract this week, have moved on. Maresca, who has been waiting on the right offer since January, now gets one.
What City are buying into
The brief Maresca will pick up is unusual. City have just lost the league for a second straight season, they are about to lose the manager who built the project, and the squad already needs renewing in midfield and at full-back. The good news for Maresca is that he knows the building, he speaks the football language Khaldoon Al Mubarak and Txiki Begiristain spent ten years investing in, and his Chelsea side, for all the late drift, played a possession-first style that maps onto City's identity more cleanly than most candidates would have.
The harder part is the comparison. Guardiola's ten years at the Etihad set the standard by which every Premier League manager is now judged, and City's owners did not start that project to plateau. Maresca arrives on a three-year deal, with a season to settle and a board that wants the title back. The talks were close enough to "here we go" on Tuesday that a formal announcement is now a matter of timing, not whether.
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