Update: |Hugo Viana has already taken his first big decision at Man City News

Manchester City’s new sporting director Hugo Viana will work alongside Txiki Begiristain until after the Club World Cup when he takes full control

It seems like a long time ago that Manchester City announced the arrival of Hugo Viana to succeed Txiki Begiristain as sporting director. Back in October, the Blues were unbeaten in all competitions and nobody had a clue of the multiple icebergs they were about to hit.

Perhaps not much has changed in Viana’s mind about what is needed with the squad. The age of the players has not changed and he will have been aware of a desire to start the rebuilding of the team last summer when it was blocked by Pep Guardiola.

Begiristain is still here and will be leading recruitment until he leaves after the Club World Cup, so it is not like Viana needed to turn the lights or the heating on when he started this week.

Florian Wirtz and Morgan Gibbs-White are players that have been scouted long before Viana walked through the door in an operation that is intended to pass smoothly from one boss to the next because of the work of the whole team throughout.

Circumstances have undoubtedly changed though. Guardiola spent months insisting that all would be better once he had his players back, only to belatedly accept that he wouldn’t have the best versions of them before the season was out.

The decision has already been made to let Kevin De Bruyne leave, and the jury is out on a number of experienced players who are playing for their future for the rest of the season.

A rebuild that was wanted last summer became so urgent in the months after Viana’s appointment that the club went against their better wishes and spent £175m in the January transfer market.

This is in the top three critical moments of what will be ten summer transfer windows during Guardiola’s time at the club. The 2017 rebuild assembled a squad that could conquer all, and in 2020 they finally found the Vincent Kompany replacement they had waited over a year for as Ruben Dias turned no-hopers into winning machines.

Viana is no stranger to pressure situations, having come into Sporting at a time of extreme unrest and not just stabilised the Portuguese club but made them tremendously successful. But it still says something that he has walked into the danger rather than taking a gentler introduction into such a high-profile job.

A lot of the work for the summer has already been done and Viana was meant to be at Sporting for the whole season, so it would have been easier for him to rock up at the Club World Cup to make clear what a short time in charge he would have this summer.

However, knowing the summer will likely be remembered as his work – for better or worse – he has started officially months earlier than expected and made himself a visible presence in the directors box at Old Trafford for the derby.

As far as handovers go, the new man has given himself three months working every day alongside Begiristain before he steps up to the top job in July.

It’s a bold move (Cotton), and one that has no guarantee of success. At the very least, it shows that Viana is more than willing to risk his own reputation to take on a new challenge in front of him that looks decidedly different from the picture at the beginning of the season.

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