Reijnders, having joined from AC Milan in June 2025, was in-and-out of City’s team throughout the 2025-26 season, before his sale to Al-Qadsiah earlier this month. Trafford, meanwhile, is a little bit more difficult to nail down as a ‘one-season wonder’, but probably counts having not made a single first team squad during his first spell with the club where he spent his youth career.

The question came in fairly late in the day ahead of the recording, but I figured it was quite a fun one and would get the thinking caps on, so it went into the end of the episode. It did mean, though, that there wasn’t time to go trawling back through squad lists to look for eligible people and, while a few good suggestions did come up, there were some glaringly obvious omissions.

So let’s celebrate them here.

First off, though, here are the conditions for this:

• The introduction of the transfer window is the starting point. Before the transfer window system was brought in for the 2002-03 season, players could move at any point before March, meaning a situation where a player appeared for a club during one season (and one season only) is a little bit rarer and a lot harder to track.

• Short-term loans are excluded, as are players who left midway through their only City season (on loan or permanently). Of course a player joining on a six-month loan only played for the club for one season, but they also played for someone else. Long term loans, however, will be included because they spent the whole campaign at City. Those who joined in the summer and left the following January will also be excluded because they didn’t last the season.

• Academy graduates who played a handful of matches aren’t counted. This is largely because I may have missed an unused sub appearance in a different season, which would rule them out as a ‘one-season wonder’. It also becomes a little complex if they have been training with the first team and part of the squad, but not included for any games.

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Along with losing Pep Guardiola, that’s already a lot of experience and know-how that is going to be elsewhere when the new season kicks off. Stones, now at Inter Milan, may not have featured much last season, but speaking at the World Cup he said he had been fit enough to contribute had the manager wanted him to and his roles in building the structure of the team in recent years have contributed massively to the club’s on-pitch success.

Meanwhile, Bernardo, now at Real Madrid, was Guardiola’s brain in the centre of midfield and could always be trusted to know what each game needed at any point.

Losing them already made 2026-27 a tricky season to navigate for a new manager. Sure, Enzo Maresca is familiar with the club, having twice already being part of the backroom staff, and he may have been the continuity candidate as a coach who subscribes to a lot of the same ideas as the outgoing man, but following Guardiola is a near-impossible task as it is. Taking away two key figures only makes it harder.

Getting Elliot Anderson in for a record fee (albeit only briefly a record fee, thanks to Chelsea’s purchase of Morgan Rogers from Aston Villa) was a good early move and seemed to set the tone for the rest of the summer transfer window. But squad planning appears to be running into brick walls at every turn, with the Premier League season about to kick off.

The news just kept getting ‘better’ on Sunday, following the 3-0 defeat to Arsenal in the Community Shield. After a game where City looked alarming easy to play through and wildly susceptible to balls straight down the centre, it broke that the club had agreed a deal with Barcelona to allow Rodri to leave. That, in fairness, had been on the cards for a while and it seemed incredibly unlikely for a long while that the midfielder would have stuck around for the final year of his contract.

At the same time Tijjani Reijnders left for Al Qadsiah, as the seventh first team departure from the squad. That list also includes Manuel Akanji (who was away on a season-long loan last year and so had pretty much already left), Nathan Ake (who joined Fenerbahce) and James Trafford (who moved to Leeds). It means that, despite briefly breaking the British transfer record by bringing in Anderson for £116m and despite other fringe arrivals like Jeremy Monga from Leicester and Geronimo Rulli from Marseille, City have still made a profit on first team transfer dealings so far this summer.

None of this includes possible deals for Savinho and Omar Marmoush to leave for Tottenham (reportedly valued at a combined £130m deal). Nor does it include a potential move away for Nico Gonzalez, with a few rumours around that he may be moved on before the deadline passes.

Surely City will have to bring in more recruits in the final weeks of the window or it could be a brutal few months until the transfer market opens again in the winter.

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In years gone by, the thought of playing a team from the continent and seeing in the flesh the sort of players that were only ever on European football coverage on ITV (or Channel Five) in the midweeks was an exciting way to whet the appetite for the upcoming season. That’s not really possible anymore.

Meanwhile, City make their return to the Community Shield this weekend, after a year away. The game has become a semi-permanent part of the fixture list over the last decade, so it did feel a little strange to watch Liverpool take on Crystal Palace at Wembley 12 months ago. Since 2018, City have been involved in all but two Community Shields.

Now, making the game a staple of the calendar was mainly Pep Guardiola’s fault. By continuously winning the Premier League (and occasionally the FA Cup with it), he landed City with this sort of ‘bridge’ match between the pre-season tour and the top flight’s opening fixture. It was often treated more seriously than a friendly, but still not a piece of silverware that was a priority (although Guardiola would always count it in any final totals). It was no Champions League final, but it was a ‘nice to have’.

With Guardiola gone, maybe City’s regular appearances in the Community Shield will be a little less predictable in the coming years.

Back before City were involved, the weekend of the curtain-raiser was always one of my favourites of the year. As the Premier League winners and FA Cup winners (or Premier League runners up in double-winning years) travelled to Wembley or to the Millennium Stadium to play out a match at 70 per cent, City were at home against somebody exciting in their final pre-season friendly: The Thomas Cook Trophy.

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After 10 senior appearances at City, he picked up his first medal, as the club lifted the Premier League in 2018. In truth, he hadn’t particularly contributed to that title, as he was slowly being introduced into the first team by Pep Guardiola. He started three games, none of them in the league, and only completed 90 minutes once. But that’s to be expected for someone making their debut at 17-years-old.

There was something about his youthful enthusiasm in those early couple of seasons that really worked in his favour, too. Fans were always desperate to see him on the field more and there was always a sense that something special was on the horizon. In fact, I distinctly remember several guests on Blue Moon Podcast telling me that, even so early in his career, they could see Foden scoring one of City’s all-time best goals.

In 2018, when he scored for the first time in the Premier League, in the 1-0 home win over Tottenham, he was selected to start that game purely because of his mentality. Guardiola felt he wasn’t weighed down by the manner of the team’s Champions League exit to Spurs some three days earlier. While the squad were down in the dumps around the training ground in the aftermath of that VAR heartbreak, Foden seemed to have brushed it off. It led Guardiola to think that would give the team the boost they needed against the same opposition in a game that they had to win if they weren’t to cede control of the title race to Liverpool.

In the years since, Foden has racked up a total of 369 games in a City shirt and his trophy cabinet contains six top flight titles, five League Cups, three FA Cups, two Community Shields, one Champions League, the UEFA Super Cup and the Club World Cup. That’s 19 trophies in total, roughly one for every 20 appearances. In a good chunk of them, he was a key player, but he is probably most in the spotlight when he took the burden on his shoulders in the four-in-a-row season of 2024.

With Kevin De Bruyne injured for the bulk of the season, Foden stepped up to the challenge and everything positive City did in their pursuit of a fourth successive league title went through him. Cutting in from the right flank and firing an effort across the goal into the top corner became a trademark, and it was the type of goal he scored when the team really needed it.

A hat-trick against Aston Villa, braces against Manchester United and West Ham, and numerous winners or equalisers through the season all drove City on to the unprecedented and also secured Foden both the Premier League Player of the Season and the PFA Players’ Player of the Year awards. He couldn’t have been any more on top of the world.

But then 2025 happened.

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There was the time he had back surgery and Juanma Lillo took charge of wins over Sheffield United and Fulham. He and Carlos Vicens were also on the bench when the manager was suspended for a defeat at Wolves later that season. For another suspension, much earlier in Guardiola’s tenure, Mikel Arteta deputised, as City lost a Champions League group game with Lyon. Rodolfo Borrell managed an FA Cup tie at Swindon when Guardiola caught Covid. Pep Lijnders famously had to take charge against his former side, Liverpool, for another Guardiola suspension.

Those were different, though. In each of them, Guardiola was allowed to have some sort of influence on the match (suspended managers must sit in the stands, but can have contact with the bench via phone or a runner). Even when he was at home after his back operation he was on the blower to the bench throughout, according to Lillo’s post-match interview.

But when Maresca is running things on Saturday, as City face Inter Milan in Hong Kong, it will be without any Catalan input on any form of electronic device. While it may only be the first of City’s three pre-season friendlies before the Community Shield in mid-August and while it may be with only half of the first team squad available thanks to post-World Cup holidays, it will still be interesting to get a feel for how things will work in the new regime.

We’ve become a bit too used to glancing down to the bench to see what Guardiola makes of something in games. In the event of a risky pass that we, as very much the inferior footballing minds to Pep, weren’t sure if it was a good idea, it became very easy to just give a quick look over to the touchline to see if it was met with a smile and enthusiastic applause or a severe bollocking. We could then take our lead from there.

Say what you like about Pep, but good at hiding what he really thought in the moment he was not. The sort of person you’d like to play poker against. Will Maresca operate in the same way in the technical area or will he keep his cards a little closer to his chest, only revealing what he really thinks within the confines of the dressing room? He’s from the same school of footballing thought as Guardiola, but his managerial style is his own.

I went to Maresca’s first press conference as City manager, ahead of the team flying off to Asia for the pre-season tour. He was keen to stress that, while he and Guardiola had similar ideas, he wasn’t going to just try and do what Pep would do: “Every manager is different, day by day and approach to games,” he said. “We are seeing which way we need to tweak some concepts.

“I don’t see the football in the same way as the previous manager,” he said. “That is why I don’t believe in copy and paste. I think there is a clear identity at the former clubs I have joined. That is probably the reason the club decided for me. They can see a similar concept with the previous manager.”

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After a year in exile on loan at Everton, City’s second-most expensive player (as of last Thursday) will not be part of the pre-season tour of Asia and, in all likelihood, will not be involved with Enzo Maresca’s new-look City next season. Officially, he isn’t travelling in order to complete his rehab on the injury that has kept him out since February, but it doesn’t take a huge amount of between-line reading to arrive at the conclusion that City don’t want him around the squad, either.

Indeed, when players who are away on loan suffer season-ending injuries, they more often than not go back to their parent club for treatment and to complete their recovery there. Grealish stayed at Everton. Make of that what you will.

That he will continue his rehab in Manchester while the squad is getting ready for the 2026-27 campaign in Hong Kong and Seoul is a rather convenient solution. If his influence wasn’t wanted around the place at the back end of Pep Guardiola’s tenure, as City went for a title in the final weeks of the season, then it was handy for him to stay on Merseyside. Now the players are elsewhere, it’s a bit “feel free to come into the CFA for treatment, Jack.”

So how did it come to this?

After a mixed first season at the Etihad, Grealish became a crucial part of the City side that was the most successful under Guardiola. Perhaps not the best Pep-era City team when judged on consistency, but certainly the one with the best outcome when the final totals for the campaign were tallied up.

At their unplayable best after the March international break, the 2023 incarnation of City romped away to claim a third Premier League title in a row, clinch the FA Cup over rivals Manchester United in the first ever Manchester Derby final, and then complete the treble by beating Inter Milan in the Champions League final. It wasn’t Guardiola’s most destructive City team, but it was perhaps the best at killing its opposition and Grealish was a key component of that.

His off-the-field problems (which we’ll come back to) appear to have led some to reassess his impact in that 2023 team. The idea that he wasn’t up to the required standard for that team and was carried to success by ten top quality players is just as ridiculous as it is the idea that he has much of a future in sky blue. Grealish may be responsible for his own downfall at City, but that doesn’t change his importance to that treble-winning side.

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To give a clearer demonstration, I knew City had been relegated in 1998 and I knew that they were heading for an unprecedented low in terms of status in the football pyramid. But when the full-time whistle went on that 5-2 win at the Britannia Stadium (with results elsewhere sealing City in the bottom three of the second tier), I processed the disappointment incredibly quickly to the point that me and my friend, Will, went outside into his garden to play cricket.

I definitely didn’t get the same sense of despair as many other City fans did throughout the beginning of the 1998-99 season, as the slide continued to a mid-table position in the third tier around Christmas. I knew it wasn’t good, but it didn’t affect me too much that City were drawing and losing too many games.

The following May, I was on a school camping trip to Anglesey. My dad drove 113 miles from Manchester to pick me up and take me a further 277 miles to Wembley to watch the playoff final. At 2-0 to Gillingham, I was absolutely distraught in a way that wouldn’t have made sense to the lad who played cricket after going down at Stoke.

What this meant was that the two promotions to get City back to the top flight in 1999 and 2000 collide perfectly with the point at which my brain got fixated on supporting the club. It was very much a ‘right place, right time’ scenario and, for that, I’ll always consider Joe Royle, who was in charged between 1998 and 2001 to be “my” City manager.

But then came Kevin Keegan.

I had been shocked that Royle had been sacked following relegation from the Premier League in 2001. I still remember my French teacher, Mr Hillary (a Stockport County home-and-away fan), collaring me in the corridor at school to tell me and the disappointment I felt with that. Looking back, the sacking probably wasn’t unjustified, but that’s another discussion for another day.

To that point, though, what I hadn’t really appreciated was that the football City played under Royle was very rooted in being good at the Proper English Football things. They got it wide, they got it into the box, they got service to the strikers and they cleared their lines when they needed. They were good at second-balls. They left a foot in where necessary. There was no pulling out and everything was blood-and-thunder. It got City to the Premier League, but it couldn’t keep them there.

When the chairman David Bernstein met with Keegan ahead of the 2001-02 season, he was asked by the prospective manager what his ambitions were. According to Keegan, “to finish in the top six in five years” was his response, and it was that level of ambition that drew him to the Maine Road dugout.

For many fans, the arrival of Keegan marks the start of a new era. It was still a time that you would find out transfer news, for instance, by seeing it reported in the next day’s newspapers. It was a world without rolling news coverage and the yellow ‘Breaking’ banner, and it was a world where we weren’t connected to the internet all day, every day (many of us still had to plug the internet in).

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But something never quite clicked in that first 12 months. I’ve always enjoyed writing and even as a young boy would write stories and ‘books’, even if they were written in felt-tip pen (for some reason) and quite often featured no coherent throughline or plot. When it came to writing news copy, I was never really able to do it.

What I could do, I discovered, was write for broadcast, specifically for radio. While I wouldn’t say I was a natural at broadcasting (the very early news reports and demos I did at that time are a terribly painful listen when revisited), I did find I could more easily spot creative ways to tell a story when making it for radio than I could when trying to write it in print.

It meant that, on leaving university with a 2:1 in Journalism, I had drifted away from writing and landed well in the realm of speaking. Those first few years looking in the job market were difficult and Blue Moon Podcast was created “as something to do” until I found work. Here we are 17 years on and it still exists. If there’s one thing I’m not, it’s a quitter.

I won’t bore you with the details of my early career, but alongside my first steps in the radio industry, I accidentally slipped back into writing. While freelancing for a local independent radio station in Stockport, I was fortunate enough to be taken on as one of ESPN’s Manchester City fan writers, alongside the excellent Simon Curtis.

At this time as well, I began writing for a Manchester City blog called Typical City, the contributors to which are still some of my closest friends and still regularly appear on Blue Moon Podcast. As work and time pressures came for each of the contributors, though, the blog ended up closing in around 2017.

A few years later, I also briefly worked for Bleacher Report, as their Manchester City correspondent. About a month after I took the role, though, it was made redundant (hopefully not a comment on the quality of my work, but we have to at least be open to the possibility that it was my arrival that made the company change their entire business model), and not long after that ESPN decided to stop with fan writing as well.

That was roughly a decade ago and, in the 10 years since, I have done the odd long read and the odd piece here and there, but largely I’ve focused on two forms of work, both in broadcasting. One part of my life is making radio for the BBC, as a freelance news producer for BBC 5 Live, and the other part of my life is making podcasts about Manchester City, with both Blue Moon Podcast and Let Me Talk, with Sam Lee.

This substack is my attempt to dive back into regular writing about City. I don’t know what will live in these pages… Maybe it’ll be nostalgia, maybe it’ll be current, maybe it’ll be news (when I get to go to press conferences and the like), maybe it’ll be good, maybe it’ll be bad. Either way, I’ve made it as cheap as Substack will allow me to (because God knows life’s expensive enough right now) and I’ve made the first 90 days free if you sign up before August 9th (just before the season starts) because we’re going to learn pretty quickly if I’m able to keep going or not.

I hope you like it.

David