Former City defender backs the club for continued success
Jerome Boateng believes Manchester City can actually get better now Pep Guardiola has left the building. The former City and Germany centre-back, speaking in a new interview with Flashscore, offered an interesting perspective on where the club goes from here.
Guardiola departed after a decade at the Etihad, collecting 20 trophies along the way — six Premier League titles and that first Champions League among them. Enzo Maresca is expected to take over, tasked with keeping those standards where they are and adding more silverware.
There have been the usual questions about whether City will suffer a post-Guardiola decline, the kind Manchester United have never really recovered from after Ferguson. Boateng isn't buying it.
“I think they can improve even more in a few years, recently they've missed a few opportunities [in European football],” he said. “In any case, today they've firmly established themselves among the top four or five teams in Europe.”
Boateng also reflected on his own time at City, particularly his relationship with Roberto Mancini, the man who brought him to the club.
“I always had a great relationship with him; after all, he was the man who wanted me at Manchester City. He taught me a lot tactically at a time when I was still a young player developing,” Boateng said.
“He gave me the basics and secrets of how to defend in England by applying the principles of the Italian defensive school, and I'm deeply grateful to him for that. My first steps in the Premier League under his guidance weren't easy, also because I got injured as soon as I arrived at the club, but he always supported me.”
He left after just one season, but insists it wasn't down to any problems at the club. Bayern Munich came calling and he wanted to be back in Germany, closer to the national team setup.
On Guardiola's arrival years later, Boateng called it “the final piece of the puzzle” and “a kind of destiny already written.”
The challenge now for Maresca is to prove City's cycle of dominance hasn't run its course. Boateng, for one, seems to think there's plenty more to come.