Update: |Man City must back Pep Guardiola over Kevin De Bruyne replacement News

Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola has been vocal about the way other teams play and how the Blues should respond

How do you replace Kevin De Bruyne? It’s a question nobody at Manchester City ever wanted to entertain and, even now that it is a reality, is still not easy.

The sad thing for De Bruyne is that he is far more replaceable now than he was at the peak of his powers. For his last contract extension, the Belgian paid a data company to come up with a list of replacements to show how much City would need to spend in the transfer market – only there were no players who matched De Bruyne’s skillset.

That may well still be the case, but others are closer than they used to be because of the 33-year-old’s decline. His departure was announced last week, yet the writing had been on the wall for a while.

Because of that, City are not at the beginning of their search for their De Bruyne replacement. Bayer Leverkusen’s Florian Wirtz is a leading name on the list to fill those golden shoes, and while the usual caveats apply about City not being held to ransom in the market it would be astonishing if they didn’t sign somebody for this position in the summer market.

What exactly they are tasked with doing is debatable though. If you can’t cover everything that De Bruyne did, which bits do you cover?

The answer has to lie with what Pep Guardiola wants in terms of how he sees the game. The City boss has been vocal this season about ‘modern football’ and the style that his side have not joined.

“Today, modern football is the way that Bournemouth play, that Newcastle play, Brighton play,” he said at the end of last year. “Liverpool have always been like that, like we were.”

Those teams, and you can include Aston Villa in that, are not short of powerful midfield talent that would undoubtedly improve the City midfield this season. The decision taken in 2023 to move towards midfield runners, hence the signings of Mateo Kovacic and Matheus Nunes, has not worked and so Guardiola has reverted to the returning Ilkay Gundogan.

As much as Guardiola defines these teams as modern, he insists that City have to stick to their own principles if they are to be successful again. It isn’t about joining Bournemouth’s and Liverpool’s game as playing at their own pace.

That instructs what kind of player City need to be targeting to replace De Bruyne and Guardiola will not be short of names that he thinks are best placed to fill the void. There is no shortage of midfielders that he admires and it is his team and his plan that are being backed.

As much as Hugo Viana will get attention for starting early before taking over from Txiki Begiristain to lead recruitment from July, De Bruyne’s replacement has to be less about how either man sees the role and more about how the man who is overseeing the masterplan does.

Guardiola has been backed to bring success back to City after an underwhelming year, so it is only fair on him that he should have a big say in the signing of such a key figure for his plans.

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