Everything is new. Everything is different. Omar Marmoush steps off the plane at Manchester Airport and what greets him is a kind of sensory overload. He peers through blacked-out windows of his chauffeured car at the city he now calls home. “What are the names of the supermarkets?” he asks. “Tesco,” comes the reply. “Asda. Sainsbury’s. Aldi.”

On the pitch, it’s a similar story. “He has something special,” Erling Haaland confirms after a dynamic debut against Chelsea last Saturday night. “He’s going to be a fantastic player for us. It’s about getting to know him as soon as possible, because there are so many important games coming.”

Related: Guardiola praises Haaland’s self-control as City prepare for next Arsenal face-off

And for all City’s travails of late, Haaland was correct: the meat of their season is arguably still to come. A double-header against Real Madrid in the Champions League. Newcastle, Liverpool, Tottenham, Nottingham Forest and Brighton in successive Premier League games. But before them all, a trip to Arsenal on Sunday afternoon where we may well discover if there is anything tangible to be salvaged from this strangest of campaigns.

Marmoush played 73 minutes against Chelsea, had 28 touches of the ball and was ineligible for the 3-1 win over Club Brugge on Wednesday night. So naturally there is a certain amount of extrapolation at work here when we say that his arrival feels like a genuine landmark in the evolution of Pep Guardiola in Manchester: perhaps even the gestation of his third great City team.

Between 2017 and 2022, City won four league titles without any single player scoring more than 21 goals in a season. This was in many ways the perfection of Guardiola’s positional theory, the football of quick passing triangles and elaborately rehearsed movements. Between 2022 and 2024, City won two league titles and a treble with Haaland scoring more than a third of their goals. This was positional football retooled around a central point: 10 players whose job was essentially to finagle the ball into scoring positions for the 11th.

But last week Guardiola offered an interesting theory about where he sees the game heading and how his City have fallen short this season. “Modern football is the way that Bournemouth play,” he said. “That Newcastle play, like Brighton play, like Liverpool always have been. Like we were. Modern football is not positional, being there. You have to ride the rhythm. We could not.”

Ride the rhythm. What does that mean in practice? Perhaps, as the above teams do, it means getting the ball with gain of time into the places where defenders are not. Fabian Hürzeler at Brighton talks about football being “situational” rather than players operating in rehearsed positions. Andoni Iraola at Bournemouth talks about players taking the initiative, “attacking the spaces” and “forgetting about the pattern”. Both coaches prefer players who can improvise on the hoof, with a strong emphasis on dribbling and instinctive combination play, quick switches and even long balls.

Guardiola has obviously been conscious of these developments for a while. In a way the signings of Jérémy Doku and Matheus Nunes were early attempts to anticipate the shift from short passing towards dribbling. And why sign two new centre-halves in Vitor Reis and Abdukodir Khusanov when in Josko Gvardiol you have a world-class option who has barely played there? Because Gvardiol has become peerless as an agent of chaos on the left, a target for switches of play, a late final-third runner whose movement from deep is almost impossible to track.

But the arrival of Marmoush adds another gear entirely. Against Chelsea the Egyptian was continually making curved runs in behind, but predominantly from outside to in, towards the central areas, against defences already primed for the threat of Haaland. The result: Chelsea began to narrow, leaving huge gaps for Nunes and Gvardiol to attack on the flanks. “He made incredible movements that players in the middle could not see,” Guardiola said of Marmoush. “It’s a question of time.”

The other side of the equation is how Marmoush’s arrival affects Haaland, recently signed to a nine-and-a-half-year contract. At Dortmund he made his name attacking off the shoulder of the last defender in a league where almost everyone leaves space in behind. At City thus far he has operated in a more limited area, either attacking the six-yard box or dropping deep to shovel the ball on.It’s a superb use of his strengths and finishing instincts, but a poor use of his lightning pace.

But now defences have to deal with the threat of Haaland dropping deep and Marmoush running in behind, or Marmoush staying wide and Haaland running in behind, or both running in behind, or both tucking in and Phil Foden running in behind, or some other combination of mayhem that exists only in Guardiola’s head. In essence City are becoming a primarily direct team with a short-passing game as their backup, whereas until recently it was the other way around.

Which brings us neatly to City’s opponents on Sunday. Arsenal too have been evolving under Mikel Arteta, adding options in midfield and defence, but has their attack evolved with it?

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To a large extent their play in the final third still follows distinct patterns, lots of quick, rehearsed movements between Martin Ødegaard and Bukayo Saka and Kai Havertz around the penalty area. But the full-backs are still largely uninvolved, the central pivots still essentially possession-shovellers and transition-deterrers, the system still geared towards minimising risk rather than inviting it.

Of course, there remains an element of conjecture here. None of this is a reliable predictor of how the next few years will pan out, much less 90 minutes at a febrile Emirates on Sunday. But even as his time at City winds down, you can sense Guardiola trying to seed the ground for what follows, in much the same way that Jürgen Klopp laid the foundations for Arne Slot at Liverpool, packing the squad with dynamic passing midfielders who he was never going to enjoy at their best.

Guardiola may not be around for City’s future. But in a way, he’s already begun to shape it.