Pep Guardiola blocked club plans last summer to start the rebuilding of the team that he now concedes is needed.

Manchester City were unbeaten in the opening months of the season and topped the Premier League in early November as they look to make more history and win a fifth consecutive league title. They still have a slim chance, but their hopes of more silverware this year have been crushed by an injury crisis that has seen instability in the team for the last two months.

City have been forced to act in the January window for the first time properly since 2018 in a bid to rescue a campaign where they are not yet sure of a place in the Champions League play-offs for the last-16. A fee has been agreed for 20-year-old Lens defender Abdukodir Khusanov and there are ongoing talks for Frankfurt forward Omar Marmoush and Palmeiras defender Vitor Reis.

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Guardiola has long championed that his team would still be challenging for everything if they had not been hit by so many destabilising injuries, and for the first time revealed that his insistence on the quality of the players meant that City bosses did not make the summer moves that they were thinking of. Savinho and Ilkay Gundogan were the only new signings for this season despite knowledge of the expected impact of the Euros, extra Champions League games and the Club World Cup.

"I always said in the summer time, the club thought to do it, and I said, 'No, I don't want to make any signings. I rely on the team and I want to stay with them,'" said Guardiola. "Just Savinho came, Gundo back - I wasn't expecting that at the end, but he came back.

"And I said, because I rely a lot with these guys and I thought still I can do it again, do it again with that guys and do it. But after the injuries – wow...maybe we should have done it, but you never know in that position.

"But I think the team is really good and the squad is really, really good. I had that feeling. The centre-defence is exceptional, the full backs are exceptional, and all the players that we had. Otherwise, we cannot achieve what we achieved in the recent year, not in the, I would say, four or five or six years. But, yeah, it's what it is."

Having celebrated the retention of key players in recent years, City are at a point where many of their squad have grown old together. Kyle Walker is set to leave this month and Gundogan, Kevin De Bruyne, Ederson, John Stones and Bernardo Silva are among those with uncertain futures as City overhaul their team.

Five of those were signed in the first two years of Guardiola's time in Manchester, enabling the club to go on to have the enormous success that they have enjoyed ever since. However, City's manager is not sure the next rebuild can be done as instantly given prices have steadily risen over the last eight years.

"In the second season, we made incredible changes. Nine, eight or nine players, they leave and arrive a lot," he said. "So, now I think it cannot happen because the inflation in football rises, you know, unbelievably. But sooner or later, it's a normal question of time.

"New players, young players, they will come. I don't know now, I don't know in summer, I don't know next season, but in the next two or three, the club has to, of course, do it. It's a question of age."