Joe Hart on Manchester City's Transition After Guardiola

Manchester City are stepping into the unknown. Pep Guardiola has gone. The decade of certainty, of automatic title talk, is over.

Into that space walks Enzo Maresca, with a new job, a new squad to reshape and, according to Joe Hart, a very old problem: the noise around Manchester City.

Maresca’s burden – and where the pressure really comes from

Hart, who won two Premier League titles in sky blue and now sits in the BBC Radio 5 Live studio, sees a club trying to manage expectations from within, even as the outside world sharpens its knives.

“I think the club isn't heaping massive expectation on this season,” he said on the Monday Night Club. “I think they still believe that they've got the team and they've got the quality to challenge.”

That’s the balance City are trying to strike. Still contenders. Just not demanding the relentless, era-defining dominance of the Guardiola years.

“I still feel they'll want to be pushing on all fronts,” Hart added. “But the same sort of pressure, as an organisation, I don't think will be on this season… I don't think they're going to be put under that pressure internally.”

Outside the Etihad, it will sound very different.

“Externally, there's always going to be the noise. Maresca will come immediately under fire in terms of how people want to jump all over Man City if they do struggle.

“Internally, I think they're intelligent enough as a business to understand that what's going on right now is going to be difficult.”

Big deals, big departures and a bruising start

The backdrop is chaotic, expensive and very City.

They briefly broke the British transfer record for an English player to land Elliot Anderson from Nottingham Forest for £116m, a huge fee for a midfielder still building his reputation. At the same time, one of their most reliable pillars looks set to go.

Rodri, Spain’s World Cup Golden Ball winner and the heartbeat of City’s midfield, looks likely to join Barcelona. Losing him would rip out a core piece of the Guardiola machine Maresca hoped to inherit.

City are already moving to reshape that midfield. Morocco’s Ayyoub Bouaddi, just 18, is in talks over an £85.6m move from Lille, while the club still want Chelsea’s Argentina midfielder Enzo Fernandez. It’s a rebuild on the fly.

All of this played out against a sobering early marker. Arsenal swept City aside 3-0 in the Community Shield in Cardiff on Sunday. Pre-season or not, it was a reminder: the league champions look sharp, and City are no longer the finished article.

Arsenal’s new test: staying where City once stood

For four straight seasons, from 2020-21 to 2023-24, City owned the Premier League. Everyone else chased. That run has gone, and Arsenal now know what it feels like to sit at the summit.

Hart, who lived through City’s own early title successes in 2011-12 and 2013-14, knows exactly what is coming for Mikel Arteta’s side.

“I was walking on water at that time. I actually thought I was 'that guy',” he admitted.

Then reality hit.

“And football finds a way, really quickly, of showing you that you're not. And when things started to unravel, which they will in any season, [they] seemed to really unravel because all of a sudden [you're under] that kind of champion scrutiny.”

That is the shift Arsenal now face. Every wobble looks bigger. Every draw feels like a crisis. Every mistake is framed as “champions creaking.”

“And it's really important how Arsenal are going to handle that,” Hart said. “But Mikel Arteta has done a brilliant job, and he makes really big decisions and bold decisions. And it's about how you handle that first hurt. It's ironic that getting to the top is the easy thing, it really is.”

So City enter a season of transition with a new man in the dugout and a midfield in flux. Arsenal enter as the team everyone wants to knock down.

One club is learning how to live without the greatest manager in its history. The other is about to discover how hard it is to stay where Guardiola kept City for so long.