. Everything is different. Omar Marmoush steps off the plane at Manchester Airport and what greets him is a kind of sensory overload. He peers through blacked-out windows of his chauffeured car at the city he now calls home. “What are the names of the supermarkets?” he asks. “Tesco,” comes the reply. “Asda. Sainsbury’s. Aldi.”
On the pitch, it’s a similar story. “He has something special,” Erling Haaland confirms after a dynamic debut against Chelsea last Saturday night. “He’s going to be a fantastic player for us. It’s about getting to know him as soon as possible, because there are so many important games coming.”
And for all City’s travails of late, Haaland was correct: the meat of their season is arguably still to come. A double-header against Real Madrid in the Champions League. Newcastle, Liverpool, Tottenham, Nottingham Forest and Brighton in successive Premier League games. But before them all, a trip to Arsenal on Sunday afternoon where we may well discover if there is anything tangible to be salvaged from this strangest of campaigns.
Marmoush played 73 minutes against Chelsea, had 28 touches of the ball and was ineligible for the 3-1 win over Club Brugge on Wednesday night. So naturally there is a certain amount of extrapolation at work here when we say that his arrival feels like a genuine landmark in the evolution of Pep Guardiola in Manchester: perhaps even the gestation of his third great City team.
Between 2017 and 2022, City won four league titles without any single player scoring more than 21 goals in a season. This was in many ways the perfection of Guardiola’s positional theory, the football of quick passing triangles and elaborately rehearsed movements. Between 2022 and 2024, City won two league titles and a treble with Haaland scoring more than a third of their goals. This was positional football retooled around …
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