Enzo Maresca is four victories away from matching Pep Guardiola’s remarkable 10-game winning start at the Etihad Stadium, after City made it six wins in a row with a 5-0 demolition of Norwich City in the Carabao Cup on Thursday night.
The result continued an eye-catching opening to the post-Guardiola era. Maresca’s side have also beaten Bournemouth, Coventry City, Crystal Palace and Manchester United in the Premier League, along with a Champions League win over Porto.
Across those six matches, City have scored 15 goals and conceded just twice, with four successive clean sheets adding weight to the sense that Maresca’s rebuild is taking shape quicker than many expected.
That run leaves City facing a testing but tantalising sequence before the comparisons with Guardiola’s opening spell can be settled one way or another.
They host Sunderland this weekend before the September international break, then travel to Anfield to face Liverpool on 11 October, welcome European champions Paris Saint-Germain to the Etihad three days later, and round off the sequence against Ipswich Town on 17 October.
Win all four and Maresca will have equalled the 10-match unbeaten opening that Guardiola produced upon his arrival in English football back in 2016.
What makes the achievement more striking is the scale of turnover in the City dressing room since Guardiola’s departure. Only Erling Haaland, Phil Foden and Ruben Dias remain from the starting XI that lost the 2023 Champions League final to Inter Milan, with Rico Lewis having been among the substitutes that night.
Rodri, Bernardo Silva, John Stones and Nathan Ake have all since left the club, while Maresca has had to bed in a raft of new arrivals including Marc Guehi, Enzo Fernandez, Elliot Anderson and Ayyoub Bouaddi. Brazilian signing Allan marked his first City start by getting on the scoresheet against Norwich.
Maresca, who spent the 2022-23 season on Guardiola’s coaching staff during City’s treble-winning campaign, says that experience has counted for less than people might assume given how much the squad has changed.
“There are only three or four players from my last season here,” Maresca said.
The head coach believes the speed of adaptation owes more to clarity of messaging than continuity of personnel.
“The most important thing when you arrive at a new club is to see that the players understand what the manager wants,” he said. “Day after day, game after game, even with so many changes, I can see it is very clear to them what we want.”
Guardiola’s own history offers a cautionary tale
For all the promise of Maresca’s start, City’s own recent past offers a reminder that fast beginnings do not guarantee lasting success.
Guardiola’s City won their opening 10 matches in all competitions in 2016-17, including six straight Premier League victories, before the run was finally ended by a 3-3 Champions League draw at Celtic Park.
What followed was a sharp reversal of fortune. City went five games without a win in October that season, and Guardiola’s first campaign in England ended trophyless. City finished third in the Premier League, went out of the Champions League in the last 16, and lost in the FA Cup semi-finals.
Maresca appears alert to the danger of reading too much into the early numbers. Rather than dwelling on parallels with Guardiola, he is reportedly planning to use the international break to review every City match from the season’s opening weeks in search of areas that still need work.
The next month will offer a far sterner examination of that progress than the last six weeks have. Sunderland provide a final, gentler test before the break, but back-to-back meetings with Liverpool and PSG will pit City’s new-look squad against opposition capable of exposing any cracks that have yet to show.
