Four dribblers in the same dressing room
Manchester City have completed the signing of Iliman Ndiaye. The Senegal forward leaves Everton for around 65 million pounds. He joins an attack already stacked with players who can beat a man one on one.
The Opta numbers make the stockpiling almost ridiculous. With Ndiaye, City now have the three players who attempted the most dribbles in the Premier League last season: Jérémy Doku (162), Antoine Semenyo (144) and Ndiaye himself (136).
On completed dribbles, the club owns four of the top eight in the division: Doku (84), Ndiaye (65), Semenyo (59) and Rayan Cherki (51). Elliot Anderson, another summer signing, finished with 50, despite playing almost twice as many minutes.
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An order that is 10 years old
For years, one theory kept doing the rounds: City would suffocate individual creativity in favour of shape and structure. Pep Guardiola supposedly had no time for dribblers. The Jack Grealish case was always rolled out as evidence.
The reality is a bit more complicated. According to Opta, Guardiola’s first instruction to the recruitment department after arriving in Manchester boiled down to one sentence: get me players who can dribble.
The numbers back him up. City finished in the top six for dribble attempts in the Premier League in four title-winning seasons: 2017-18 (797), 2018-19 (801), 2020-21 (845) and 2021-22 (782).
Guardiola has gone, Enzo Maresca has taken over. The recruitment brief has barely shifted.
The real issue is a low block
Behind the collection, there is a calculation. City spend most of their matches trying to find a crack in packed defences. Last season, 23.4% of their build-up time came against a low block, the third-highest share in the league.
You can try to work around it with five or 10 extra passes. Or you can ask a winger to rip a defender out of shape.
Doku was signed from Rennes in 2023 with the same questions hanging over him: not enough goals, end product up for debate. He has gone on to become one of the best wide men in the league when it comes to taking opponents on.
Guardiola had already warned that the future of the game would tilt towards more transition-based styles, far from his own possession-heavy gospel. His successors seem to have taken him at his word.
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