City replace a 40 million pound goalkeeper with a 34-year-old who cost 3.8 million euros

Manchester City sold a goalkeeper for a club-record £40 million in July and replaced him on Wednesday for a reported 3.8 million euros. James Trafford went to Leeds United. Geronimo Rulli has come in from Marseille on a two-year deal, wearing 28, and the gap between those two numbers tells you exactly what City think the job is now.

The job is holding the coat

Gianluigi Donnarumma is the first choice and nothing about this window suggests otherwise. Trafford was 23, English, a homegrown asset and, at £40m plus add-ons with a 20 per cent sell-on written in, an obvious piece of business for a club that needs the accounting to work. What City lost in that deal was not a starter. It was a young man who was going to spend another season watching.

Rulli will not mind watching. He is 34, he has been a No. 2 before at international level, and Enzo Maresca has bought a keeper who will not sulk through nine months of cup ties and dead rubbers. That is a specific skill, and it is worth less on the open market than potential is, which is why one of these transfers cost more than ten times the other.

Indian fans have seen this keeper before

Anyone who watched the 2021 Europa League final remembers Rulli whether they know his name or not. Villarreal and Manchester United went to 11 rounds of penalties in Gdansk, every outfield player took one, and it came down to the two goalkeepers. Rulli scored his. Then he saved David de Gea’s, and Villarreal had their first European trophy.

He was in Argentina’s squad in Qatar in 2022, an unused substitute behind Emiliano Martinez for all seven matches, which still counts as a World Cup winner’s medal. At Marseille he played 73 times after joining in the summer of 2024, was very good in his first season under Roberto De Zerbi, and dropped off last year. That dip is presumably part of why the fee was so small.

What it leaves behind

Marseille now need a goalkeeper of their own and have gone after Marcin Bulka, the Poland international at Neom, with a loan proposal already submitted.

For City, this is the quiet kind of signing that gets judged in about April, when Donnarumma pulls up in a warm-up or picks up a suspension and a 34-year-old Argentinian has to keep a title race intact for three weeks. Rulli has done stranger things. He once beat Manchester United from 12 yards in the space of two kicks.

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