Manchester City hijack Arsenal to sign teenager Jeremy Monga from Leicester

Manchester City have won the chase for one of English football’s most sought-after teenagers, agreeing a deal with Leicester City for 16-year-old winger Jeremy Monga after Arsenal walked away from the table.

The transfer is worth up to £12.5m, structured as £10m guaranteed with a further £2.5m in add-ons. Monga is still on a scholarship, so the move only becomes official when he turns 17 on 10 July, the point at which his youth deal converts into a full professional contract at the Etihad.

Maresca gets his man

The push came from Enzo Maresca, who replaced Pep Guardiola in the City dugout this summer. Maresca knows the player well from his season in charge at Leicester, and he made Monga one of the targets he wanted to inherit rather than leave behind. For a coach building his own version of City, signing a 16-year-old he already trusts says plenty about how highly he rates him.

Monga will not be thrown straight into the first team. City see him as a long-term project, a winger to develop over the next few seasons rather than a ready-made starter, and the size of the fee for someone who has yet to turn 17 reflects the ceiling they think he has.

Arsenal blink first

For weeks Arsenal had looked like the club most likely to land him. They opened with an offer of around £5m, Leicester rejected it, and when the Foxes refused to move off their valuation the Gunners decided the deal was not worth chasing any further. City read the situation, stepped in, and got the agreement over the line before anyone else could react.

Leicester, relegated to the Championship, were never going to hold on to a talent this coveted for long. Getting a fee that can rise to £12.5m for a player still short of his 17th birthday counts as good business for a club rebuilding its finances.

A teenager who keeps breaking records

Monga’s rise has been anything but slow. He made his senior debut for Leicester at 15 years and 271 days, coming off the bench against Newcastle to become the second-youngest player in Premier League history. He then became the youngest player ever to start a match for the club, and not long after scored away at Preston North End to set the record as the youngest goalscorer in Championship history at 16 years and 37 days.

England have already taken notice, handing him his under-18 debut in March. That is the profile City have bought into: a winger who has spent the last two years being too good for his age group and too young for almost every record he has broken.

The signing fits the wider reshape at City. After spending a British-record £116m on Elliot Anderson and tying Josko Gvardiol to a new contract, adding Monga is the club looking further down the road, stocking the squad Maresca will still be working with years from now.

Follow all the summer transfer moves here