“City will be more exciting on the field with Pellegrini, but less exciting off it”

Lifesapitch, 13th June 2013

With Manuel Pellegrini’s appointment as Roberto Mancini’s replacement expected to happen any day now, Manchester City fans will be eager to find out more about their new manager. Will he get on better with the players than the fractious Italian? Will his team play more attractive football? And crucially, given the key reason Mancini was sent packing was down to a lack of trophies last season, will he be more successful? Here, the Life’s a Pitch team give their take on the former Malaga boss and his chances of glory in the Premier League.

“I sense Man City will be more exciting on the field with Pellegrini, but less exciting off the field than they were with Mancini,” says the Sunday Telegraph’s Jason Burt. “I personally think it’s a very, very good appointment and I think it will work for them.”

Footballer-turned-journalist Adrian Clarke believes many players were glad to see the back of Mancini and that Pellegrini’s calmer presence – as well as his tactical nous – will reinvigorate the squad. “Ordinarily, players don’t like change, they like to stick with the manager that signed them. But in this case, I think the departure of Mancini will have given the dressing room a lift – I think they needed it. What’s come out since his departure is that it was an unhappy dressing room, they were fed up with the manager – they’d stopped listening to him. I think the talent is there to kick on and find the form they had when they won the title, it just needed a change. And I can see his arrival and his credentials lifting the dressing room.”

According to the Mirror’s Martin Lipton, chief executive Ferran Soriano and sporting director Txiki Begiristain were also fed up with Mancini. “They clearly decided that Mancini hadn’t developed the team. The suggestion I was given at the end of last season is that they were bored with them playing grind-out, rubbish football. That they didn’t think they’d progressed at all. That they were scraping together wins. And with the quality of squad they should have been better than that – they should have been exciting and fluent.”

Two new signings the club will hope can help with that are Shakhtar Donetsk’s Fernandinho and Sevilla’s Jesús Navas – recruited by Begiristain at a combined cost of £50m before Pellegrini has even started work – but Jason has his doubts, especially over Navas, who has a history of homesickness.

“I think Fernandinho and Navas are risky signings, as good players as they are. The fact there are Spanish players there – there’s Javi García as well as David Silva – will help, but I think it will be an issue to deal with – they’ll have to be careful with him [Navas]. I think Fernandinho is interesting as well because they paid an awful lot of money for a 28-year-old midfielder. He is a very, very good player, but some people tell me there is better value in the market than Fernandinho.”