Who will replace Pep Guardiola as Manchester City manager?

Manchester City are once again struggling to keep pace with the Premier League leaders.

After failing to challenge Liverpool at all last season, it does rather appear like they might struggle to give Arsenal much beyond old demons to think about this season.

Which leaves a question. Does Pep Guardiola have the will or the energy to see through this rebuild with a new team playing a new way while not competing with the title that had once been his personal property? Maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t.

But he is now alarmingly prominent in the Sack Race and regardless, at some point in the future whether near or distant someone else is going to be in charge of Manchester City .

They probably won’t have a decade of Premier League experience or over 250 Premier League wins or five Premier League titles.

Following Guardiola at City appears to be a genuinely thankless task but someone will have to do it at some point. And according to the latest odds, it’s one of these lads.

Tricky. Does he want the stress and hassle of another big-club appointment? Not sure. Does he want the stress and near-impossible hassle of trying to keep up with said big clubs while having the more limited resources of Aston Villa upon which to call? Also not sure.

Such is the nature of the modern game that Knows The Football Club can now also be Knows The Football Group. Michel had Girona on one of the least likely title bids ever seen in La Liga and ‘fading to third behind Real Madrid and Barcelona’ still represented astonishing over-achievement in 2023/24. But does all rather feel like he may have slightly missed the boat having failed to land a big job – inside or outside the Football Group – on the back of that unrepeatably stellar campaign.

Girona have subsequently reverted to the mean, finishing just a point above the bottom three last season and sitting mid-table now. Which is no disgrace, but does explain why the long-term favourite is now clinging on to a place inside this top 10.

He’s the Knows The Club appointment, the Spoke Well, I Thought appointment, and having seen his Burnley struggles rewarded with a failing upwards to make Roberto Martinez blush he now has the Big Club credentials, too.

Has done more than well enough at Bayern Munich to suggest that any next steps that take him back to England will come at a loftier perch than Burnley’s.

You can’t deny it would display a certain wit. Especially if he rocks up at the Etihad and does brilliantly.

Even in the midst of one of his frequent and baffling runs of truly abysmal form, still feels inevitable that Bournemouth’s manager will one day go the way of Kerkez or Huijsen or Semenyo and the rest.

How his Bournemouth side finish this season could have huge repercussions for the summer and beyond at several clubs.

Jurgen Klopp’s former assistant sought to break out on his own as manager of Red Bull Salzburg, which did not go well. Now Pep’s assistant at City . And if nothing else, serving as assistant manager to both Klopp and Guardiola should provide a pretty decent grounding in what elite management looks like.

Really is good fun how all of these lists now feature the same handful of names in a slightly shuffled order. Glasner will almost certainly be at a Big Six club next season if not before.

As for which one, that’s an altogether trickier little puzzle. Really could be any of five, with only Arsenal tentatively ruled out at this time.

Really could be quite a tussle for his signature this summer. That is of course if Spurs don’t nip in first before everyone else realises what’s happened . Stop giggling.

Strongly linked with the job even before he left Chelsea. Which turned out to be in at least some part why he lost the Chelsea job.

Luring the manager of PSG would represent something of a coup, but there’s also the valid argument that Enrique has no worlds left to conquer in Paris and may wish to once again test himself in a league with more than one decent team in it.

Obviously he’s not a crazy person, so would still want to try his hand with the team that offered the best chance of continuing the trophy-laden life to which he has become accustomed. Ergo, Man City fits rather better than the other main possibility elsewhere in the city.