Maresca’s City Struggles Under Wembley Lights – Is This the New Normal?

Manchester City have spent the summer sketching out a clear picture of what Enzo Maresca wants them to be. On Sunday at Wembley, someone smudged the lines.

Against Arsenal in the Community Shield, City looked nothing like the slick, structured side that had been taking shape on the Asia tour. They were disjointed, uncertain, and – for long spells – second best. For a club that has grown used to being more than the sum of its parts, this was the opposite.

Yes, Arsenal are a level above the opposition City have faced in pre-season. That matters. But the drop-off still jarred, especially when four of City’s biggest names were thrown straight back into the starting XI days after returning from holiday.

Erling Haaland, Elliot Anderson, Nico O’Reilly and Jeremy Doku all started. On paper, that looks like a manager going all-in for his first piece of silverware. In reality, it was more complicated.

Maresca explained it afterwards: this was about Bournemouth, not the Community Shield. He wanted his returning stars to build rhythm by starting and then coming off, not by being dropped into the chaos of a second-half cameo.

“Sometimes players prefer to start doing the proper warm up and start from the beginning,” he said. The plan, he added, was always to hook them after 45 to 60 minutes. In short, Wembley was a conditioning exercise dressed up as a final.

The problem was what that plan did to the structure of the team.

Anderson, praised only days earlier by Maresca as a natural No.6 or No.8, found himself marooned on the right in an odd, drifting role. It didn’t suit him. It didn’t suit City. And it certainly didn’t suit Mateo Kovacic, who was left isolated as the lone holding midfielder and repeatedly overrun.

There were flashes from Anderson – two sharp deliveries into the box for Haaland and Doku hinted at his attacking quality – but they were isolated moments in a system that never looked comfortable.

Then there was the right-back situation. Matheus Nunes, publicly backed as City’s first-choice option there and trusted enough that the club have cooled plans to sign competition, was missing. In his place, Abdukodir Khusanov endured a rough afternoon, exposed along with a back line that never settled.

Those two selection calls alone tilted the contest. They made City’s task harder, invited pressure, and sparked immediate questions about whether Maresca was abandoning his own blueprint at the first serious hurdle.

Yet his work over the summer suggests the opposite. Anderson in his natural zone and Nunes restored at right-back should make this City side look very different, very quickly. Sunday felt like a detour rather than a roadmap.

The biggest curveball of the day, though, came at half-time.

Jack Grealish, fresh from a loan at Everton and left out of the summer tour while City explored moving him on, suddenly appeared from the bench. On recent evidence, those minutes might have gone to someone like Rayan Ait-Nouri. Instead, the £100m winger stepped into the spotlight.

For City, Grealish’s involvement raised eyebrows. For clubs weighing up a move, it was a useful reminder that the player still has something to offer. His cameo did nothing to dampen outside interest and may yet nudge a transfer over the line.

So what did this first major examination of Maresca actually tell us?

On the day, he failed it. The performance was flat, the structure fragile, the decisions jarring. It left doubts about how quickly his ideas will land and whether they are sharp enough to sustain a Premier League and Champions League challenge in the post-Pep Guardiola era.

But the very un-Maresca nature of some of those calls hints at a longer game. This looked less like a manifesto and more like a pre-season experiment played under the harsher lights of a trophy match.

The reaction has been fierce. Defeat in the Community Shield, and the manner of it, has triggered sweeping verdicts on Maresca’s City after just 90 competitive minutes.

The next few weeks will decide whether Wembley was an early warning or just noise. Is this a crack in the new project – or simply the ugly, necessary part of building one?