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This is the Football Daily podcast with Kelly Cates.

Hello and welcome to the Football Daily podcast with me, Kelly Cates.

Coming up, we'll be covering the blue side of Manchester as Pep Guadiolla looks to put an

overwhelming 2024-25 season behind him and guides City to what would be a 7th Premier League title in nine years.

Over the next hour-ish, we'll take a look at their new recruits.

We'll ask whether Pep Guardiola has a newfound fire to take City back to the top,

and we'll discuss whether we'll finally see a resolution to the hearings into city's

115 charges for allegedly breaching the Premier League's financial rules.

Alongside me throughout this conversation, the former city captain, Steph Horton, Sam Lee,

Manchester City correspondent for the athletic, and Guillain Balagay from Five Lives Euroleague's

podcast, also author of the biography,

Pep Guardiola, another way of winning. Good evening to all of you. Let's start, Sam, by putting this into context.

And we talk about this as having been a disappointing season for Manchester City last time out.

Just outline the ways in which it was disappointing and the ways that we're in Manchester City's control.

Well, the ways that were in their control is quite, that's quite a difficult framing, actually.

It's caught me out because in terms of what wasn't in their control. And then we put that into the club because I was thinking of Rodry's injury and yeah I had yeah I had so many games last season when the correspondent for the other team we've played what's going on with City this season it can't just be Rodry can it and it's like it's not just Rodry but he was basically the first domino to fall I think that exposed the fact that in the city midfield, there's nobody like it, which the club knew for ages. So that, in one sense, is for their control. They always knew, if anything happens to Rodry, we use two players in that role and one ahead of them, Kevin DeBroiner, for example. But Roderies' injury kind of exposed the fact that you know gund Gundwin had come back from Barcelona, but they thought he'd play higher up. It doesn't really have the legs of mobility to play deeper in midfield when the game stretched. Kovitch is a very good player, but he's not a Rodry. So then they were getting worked around easier. I think when they won the treble two years ago, one of the underrated parts of City was the fact that they were so good at winning the second balls. Obviously, everybody focuses on what they do in possession, but out of it, they were absolute monsters. Last season, they lost that. They didn't seem to have the legs. Even players like Rico Lewis, very good on the ball, not quite so good off it. So when they were losing it, it was getting through the midfield easily.

And another kind of focus of the treble season was the defence.

They were so solid 1v1.

And last season, the defence was absolutely decimated by injuries.

They couldn't get any kind of rhythm whatsoever.

Dias never normally has injuries.

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