Back in mid-February we invited requests from our subscribers for articles you might like to read on The Athletic as part of our latest Inspired By You series. Michael T. asked for a piece on the dynasty of Manchester City’s deep-lying midfielders.
So Sam Lee took a look…
Manchester City have been blessed with some of the finest players in the Premier League era, and perhaps the biggest concentration of talent has been right in the middle of the pitch.
Three managers have won Premier League titles with City — Roberto Mancini, Manuel Pellegrini and Pep Guardiola — and each have benefited from being able to call upon some of the most versatile, talented and intelligent players in arguably the most important position in football.
As City fans will remember fondly, three of the club’s best deep-lying midfielders all played in the same team: Gareth Barry, Nigel de Jong and Yaya Toure.
“It’s about adapting to different games and partners,” Barry told City TV recently of his strengths in the role. “You’ve got to be unselfish sometimes.
“When me and Nigel started together, Yaya would play in front of us. Or Nigel would come on, meaning Yaya could go forward when we needed a goal.
“At the end of my City career, I wanted to play deeper and so did Nigel so I would adapt my game, which was one of my strengths.”
(Michael Regan/Getty Images)
Given the success of the Guardiola era, if you were to draw up a perfectly balanced City midfield these days it would probably include one jack-of-all-trades holding midfielder behind two more attacking midfielders (one with ‘pausa’ and one more of a destroyer, but that is another story).
A De Jong-Barry-Toure midfield feels almost awkward by those standards, but Mancini always preferred a solid two-man midfield base, and the adaptability and versatility of his options set City on their way to the dominance they have enjoyed since the 2008 takeover by the Abu Dhabi United Group.
Joleon Lescott, a title-winning defender with City in those early years, has spoken glowingly of legends like Sergio Aguero, David Silva, Joe Hart and Vincent Kompany since his departure, and the more unheralded Barry is held in the same regard.
“Nigel, Samir (Nasri), James Milner, Yaya Toure, David Silva all said if they could pick one player to be their partner in midfield, it would be Gareth Barry,” Lescott previously told The Athletic. “They all said it. His game intelligence was as good as anybody’s and he knew exactly what to do to get the best out of everybody else.”
Those first players through the door in the years after the takeover had to deal with a lot of “bad press”, as Barry put it, because of the perception that they had only joined City for the money.
“I knew at the time that it was a gamble,” Barry, who had fake bank notes waved at him following his move from Aston Villa, told Sky Sports in 2019. “I had a tough year or two feeling the heat of not winning a trophy straight away.”
“In that time, we got a lot of backlash,” De Jong said after his retirement. “Everyone was afraid of the change happening in the world of football.”
Gareth Barry knew his move to City was ‘a gamble’ (Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)
De Jong arrived at City six months before Barry, midway through the 2009-10 season in an £18million deal from Hamburg, at a time when Mark Hughes’ side sorely needed strengthening in midfield.
The Dutchman quickly established himself as a fan favourite thanks to his no-nonsense, aggressive approach; before long, he had his own chant to the tune of ‘When The Saints Go Marching In’: “There’s only gonna be one winner, oh when De Jong goes sliding in.”
He was far more of a tackler than a passer, as this graphic neatly demonstrates, but that certainly had its place at the time, even if more has come to be expected of City’s midfield men since.
Barry, by contrast, had the knack of “just being there, putting out fires before they happen”, as Lescott puts it, but those complementary styles did not make them a partnership initially: Barry’s arrival six months after De Jong actually put the Dutchman on the bench, but Mancini, who replaced Hughes another six months on, quickly paired them at the back of midfield, a staple of the Italian’s robust, disciplined style.
Six months later, Toure arrived.
“We just assumed he’d come to play defensive midfield because that’s where he played for Barcelona, but he came in and he’s playing all positions,” Lescott said. “And he can do them all.”
“We didn’t even know he was quick! Not until we played Sunderland away (in August 2010). They had a corner and he broke and ran at Kieran Richardson, who was quick, and he left him. We ended up with a corner and we all said after the game, ‘Nobody even knew you had that in you! You’ve been holding out on us all this time’.”
While Barry was one of those players who “you don’t appreciate unless you play them”, Toure’s talents were more obvious. From bulldozing through midfield to score or playing a perfectly measured pass, it was no surprise that he ended up in advanced areas, especially with a solid base behind him.
“A superstition the manager had was taking me off for Edin (Dzeko),” Barry said, although Mancini bringing on De Jong to ‘release’ Toure was perhaps a more famous change, something done to the most devastating effect at Newcastle during the 2011-12 run-in, allowing the Ivorian to score twice in a crucial win.
Yaya Toure celebrates scoring at Newcastle in May 2012, in a pivotal win in the title run-in (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
And while there are countless on-pitch moments that come to mind when remembering Toure’s midfield prowess, a grainy Sky Sports graphic from the 2013-14 season spells it out: he scored 20 goals that season, including 10 from set pieces from just 13 attempts, as well as nine assists and 40 chances created.
“Every time I passed the ball to Yaya, even a strong pass or a bad pass, he always — I don’t know how — found a way to turn the opposite way from where the pressure was coming,” former City keeper Willy Caballero told The Athletic. “He ran with the ball so well and I have never seen him lose a ball. He was a fantastic midfielder to play with.”
Toure, somewhat controversially in the end, managed to span the three title-winning managers of the modern era and was given a fitting send-off at the Etihad Stadium when he left in 2018, but given the type of smooth succession planning that City have liked to achieve in recent years, and certainly achieved with Fernandinho and Rodri, it feels unusual now that De Jong and Barry moved on so abruptly.
Due to a contract dispute, De Jong’s final game for City was the famous title-clinching game against Queens Park Rangers, and a year later, after Barry had made 41 first-team appearances, he was told by director of football Txiki Begiristain that he had no future at the club.
De Jong replacing Toure against QPR in 2012 — the Dutchman’s final appearance for City (Alex Livesey/Getty Images)
“He phoned my agent and said that regular football would not be guaranteed next season,” Barry said at the time. “I wasn’t pushed out at all,” he added. “But when the squads were announced, I wasn’t travelling for friendlies, and so the writing’s on the wall when that happens.”
With Pellegrini replacing Mancini, City were pursuing a more “holistic” playing style, as they put it at the time; they wanted to step away from Mancini’s rigid tactical approach and towards a more free-flowing style, with the goal of later bringing in Pep Guardiola.
Fernandinho almost sums up that transition between Pellegrini and Guardiola: City were brilliant as they won the league and League Cup double in Pellegrini’s first season, Toure’s standout campaign, but things did drift after that and Fernandinho, who was a more attacking presence back then, only truly made his mark under the Catalan.
“He scored a lot of goals in his position but he sacrificed that in the best way to help the team,” Caballero says of Fernandinho’s move into a deeper role.
As early as October 2016, just a few months into the job, Guardiola had spotted the Brazilian’s worth.
“He is fast, he is intelligent, strong in the air and he can play in several positions,” he told reporters. “As soon as he sees a space he runs there immediately. If you need someone to make a correction or a challenge, he sees it too. If a team had three Fernandinhos, they would be champions. We only have one and he is very important to us.”
(Michael Regan/Getty Images)
Still, that tendency to run into a space would not have been a good thing given Guardiola’s approach to the holding midfield role, one that he played during his career.
“Last season he moved too much — the holding midfielder has to be there, don’t move. Be there. Like if you drive a car and move to the back seat, you can crash. The driver has to be there in the front.
“He’s getting better at reading the situation and defensively he has more presence.”
That was Guardiola discussing his star holding midfielder a few years ago — but he was talking about Rodri, not Fernandinho.
Rodri arrived in 2019 with known weaknesses: Guardiola and his staff expected him to leave gaps on the pitch, but thought he would have time to bed in gently. They were wrong: Fernandinho was moved to centre-back to replace the injured Aymeric Laporte, and Rodri was thrown in at the deep end, only to see the weaknesses in his game exploited, making City more open.
(Shaun Botterill/Getty Images)
By that point, Fernandinho had come to be regarded as the perfect holding midfielder for City. He was less creative and more combative than Sergio Busquets, the brilliant Barcelona ‘pivot’ that had so closely resembled Guardiola himself on the pitch, but that suited the Premier League’s more physically demanding nature.
“Fernandinho has achieved another level, with his positivity and his mentality,” Guardiola said during City’s ‘Centurion’ season, when they won the title with 100 points.
As Barry and De Jong demonstrated with their adaptability and selflessness, the best holding midfielders tend to make those around them better thanks to their efforts on and off the pitch, something that Fernandinho fully demonstrated from that 2017-18 season until he left the club in 2022.
“He always tries to help the team, the guys who don’t play, myself, the staff,” Guardiola said in 2021. “He is so generous. He is just thinking about what the team needs and what is best for the team.
“This is a real captain, when they always think about what is best for the team and the club.”
By that point, Rodri’s form was flourishing and Fernandinho was slowing down, although his off-field influence was arguably stronger than ever: he helped shake the team out of its 18-month stupor at the end of 2020, kickstarting a run of four successive league titles — and Rodri’s emergence as the world’s best holding midfielder.
(Michael Regan/Getty Images)
“Never since I arrived in the training sessions have I seen him a little bit flat or a little bit distracted,” Guardiola said of Rodri last year.
“What he has is the quality. Quality, presence, composure, personality. How he reacts when we concede a goal. His body language. It’s a thousand million things.”
It seemed unthinkable at the time that there could be an improvement on Fernandinho, but Rodri has achieved it. As well as the defensive grit that the Brazilian showed, not to mention the knack of breaking up attacks by fair means or foul, Rodri has developed his understanding of the game to master the role in the way that Busquets did.
On top of that, in recent seasons, he has improved his attacking output, not just reflecting Busquets in his control of the game, but even Toure in the way that he can make the difference in the final third.
“I would say if the holding midfielder doesn’t get the same appreciation as the strikers or the No 10, then that is good,” Guardiola said last year. “When a holding midfielder has a lot of appreciation, it is not good.
“The holding midfielder has to play positive, for him and for the team, and make the team play. This is the role for the holding midfielders.
“All the highlights have to be for the guys up front who score goals and make assists and so on.
“But Rodri always has the ability in important moments to score goals so he’s an unbelievable player. He’s the best midfield player in the world currently by far because he is able to do everything.”
So there has not really been an evolution of City’s midfielders over the years; just a string of talented players with different strengths playing in different teams — not to mention a few signings that have not worked out — and you get the sense that no matter the manager, and no matter the style of play, they all had what it takes to thrive.
(Header photo: Michael Regan/Getty Images)
