Man City will follow Omar Berrada transfer message in January window

The last time Manchester City didn't win the league, it was in part explained by a failing in the transfer market.

Vincent Kompany decided to leave after winning a domestic clean sweep in 2019 to pursue his coaching ambitions and the Blues were stunned when they approached Leicester for Harry Maguire and were told his asking price was £80m - less than half of what had been floated. City refused to pay having also thought £75m was too much for Virgil Van Dijk 18 months earlier, and then when Aymeric Laporte suffered a cruciate ligament injury at the end of August that was effectively the end of City's title challenge.

That was only the case though because John Stones and Nicolas Otamendi were not in form, and because Jurgen Klopp's Liverpool were unstoppable. City may have proven that their squad was big enough as well as good enough had Laporte not suffered a long-term injury that couldn't have been foreseen, or they could have been blown away by Liverpool regardless.

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Nevertheless, it put more pressure on the 2020 window and the importance of finding the correct replacement for Kompany. A summer where Napoli's Kalidou Koulibaly was chased ended up with Ruben Dias signing on the back of an unthinkable 5-2 home defeat to Leicester, only for the club's own website to offer links for City fans to buy a Koulibaly shirt in the article announcing Dias.

Dethroned as champions, and with 2019 signings Angelino and Rodri (!) having not worked out, City bosses took the unusual step of speaking publicly to get their message across. Omar Berrada, COO at the time, told the Manchester Evening News (via Zoom in the midst of the pandemic) that it had been prudent to wait for Dias and that City had the squad they needed to reclaim the league.

"When you make investments of that type, when you get it wrong it has a significant impact over many years so we needed to get it right at the right valuation at the right time but more importantly for the right player," he said. "In the same way that we didn't rush into buying a centre-back last season after not wanting to sign Maguire for that valuation, this summer we had a very clear idea of what we wanted and fortunately we got the player we wanted at the valuation that we wanted."

There were still concerns from fans, and those heightened with the performances at the beginning of that season, but the board were ultimately proved correct. Then again the year after, and the year after that, and the year after that.

It may well be that this is the year that proves the end of City's reign as Premier League champions, but it is far too early to be saying that when they have been in worse positions much later in the season. Even if it is the end, that doesn't necessarily mean the squad needed to be bigger.

Guardiola deliberately has a small squad because of his management style and that has tended to work out pretty well when there haven't been as many injuries as this. As he said earlier this month in a testy press conference: “If next season I know I will have seven or eight players injured then I need a bigger squad.”

Berrada has since moved to Old Trafford but there will unlikely be anyone at City publicly justifying their transfer business because their trophies speak to that better than any words can. Pressure remains to win again, and to prove that this is not a team at the end of a cycle, yet it is a challenge that City's hierarchy are used to completing.

Time will tell if they can wipe away those concerns once more, but the Blues will be thinking about more than just this season when they establish what they end up doing in the January transfer market.