City hand Maresca the Guardiola inheritance, a job that is equal parts gift and trap
There was always a tidy logic to Manchester City hiring from inside the family, and in Enzo Maresca they appear to have done exactly that. The reported three-year deal, running to 2029, makes the Italian Pep Guardiola's successor and hands him a squad, a method and a weight of expectation that almost no incoming manager has ever had to carry from day one. Depending on how you look at it, this is either the safest appointment City could have made or the most daring. I think it is somehow both.
Why the choice makes sense
Maresca knows the building. He came back to City in June 2022 as one of Guardiola's assistants and was in the dugout for the treble in 2022-23, so the positional play, the inverted full-backs and the patience in possession are not ideas he has to learn from a coaching manual. He watched them work at close range. When you are replacing the best part of a decade built on a single footballing idea, that kind of continuity is worth more than a fresh voice promising to tear it all down.
The CV stands up on its own
This is not a sentimental hire either. Maresca took a relegated Leicester side and won the Championship in his first season, going up as champions in 2024. He then moved to Chelsea and, inside two seasons, lifted the UEFA Conference League and the expanded FIFA Club World Cup while steering the club back into the Champions League. Plenty of managers spend a whole career without a trophy to show for it. He has collected several before turning to the biggest job of his life.
Here is what gives me pause
And yet. Following the most successful manager in a club's history is a particular kind of trap, and football is littered with the careers of decent coaches who happened to walk in straight after a giant. Whoever came after Ferguson at United knows the feeling. The same shadow now falls across the Etihad. Maresca's Chelsea, for all the silverware, was sometimes accused of being slow and over-controlled, and a City crowd raised on Guardiola's sharpest sides may not grant much patience if the early months look careful rather than thrilling.
The squad itself is in flux, too. The end of the Guardiola era has already left a few futures hanging in the air, and a new manager often arrives to find half his inheritance wondering whether they still fit. Maresca will have to settle that noise before he can stamp anything of his own on the team.
The honest verdict
Nobody can tell you with a straight face how this ends, because there is no clean template for replacing a manager like Guardiola. What I would say is this. If City were always going to take a gamble here, then gambling on someone who already speaks the language fluently is the least reckless version of it. Maresca might struggle under the size of the job. He might also be the rare appointment who makes the transition look obvious in hindsight. Either way, it is shaping up as one of the more fascinating stories of the new season.
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