Are you predicting Manchester City, or are you still predicting Pep Guardiola's Manchester City?

For about a decade, predicting Manchester City has been the easiest part of predicting the Premier League. You look at the table, find first or second, put City there, and then start worrying about everyone else. Pep Guardiola did that to us — not because City literally won the league every season, but because they became the closest thing English football had to a constant. Managers changed elsewhere, squads fell apart, and title challengers appeared for a year before disappearing again, while City just kept turning up, winning 80-something or 90-something points, and making anyone predicting their decline look a bit stupid.

And now, for the first time in ten years, Pep Guardiola isn't standing on the touchline — and that's a much bigger deal than I think we're treating it as. Guardiola left Manchester City this summer after a decade in charge and 20 major trophies, and Enzo Maresca is the man they've chosen to follow him, signing a three-year deal after previously working inside City's system both with the academy and as part of Guardiola's first-team staff. That makes him about as logical a successor as City could possibly have picked — but logical doesn't mean seamless, and that's where this season gets really interesting.

We've forgotten how much of City was actually Pep.

When a manager stays somewhere for ten years, it's incredibly difficult to separate the club from the manager. We talk about "Manchester City's style" as though it's something permanently stored in the walls of the Etihad — playing out from the back, suffocating possession, full-backs appearing in midfield, players changing positions halfway through their careers, winning 14 league matches in a row just when everyone starts thinking the title race might be getting interesting. But how much of that was Manchester City, and how much of it was Guardiola? That's the question Maresca has to answer almost immediately.

Because succeeding a legendary manager isn't just about knowing his tactics — it's about replacing thousands of tiny decisions that nobody outside the training ground ever saw. When does Pep decide a player needs dropping? When does he realise a tactical idea isn't working? What does he say after a horrible defeat, and how does he keep a squad that's already won everything desperate enough to win it again? That's the stuff you can't inherit on a tactics board.

Maresca isn't ripping everything up — and that's probably the point.

The interesting thing about City's choice is that they've clearly not gone looking for a revolution. Maresca already knows the club — he coached City's Elite Development Squad before later returning as part of Guardiola's first-team staff, and City have presented that familiarity with their footballing structure as one of the advantages of bringing him back. So we're unlikely to watch City suddenly abandon possession football and start lumping diagonals towards Erling Haaland from the halfway line; the principles should look familiar. The difficult part is working out whether familiarity is enough.

Because Maresca isn't being asked to copy Guardiola — he's being asked to follow him, and those are completely different jobs. Copy Pep too closely and every bad result becomes Pep would've done this differently; change too much and suddenly the question becomes why mess with something that worked for ten years? There's basically no version of this job where Maresca isn't being compared with the man who came before him, and that pressure starts from game one.

The first wobble is going to tell us a lot.

This is what I'm most interested in — not City's first match, not even their first five, but what happens when something goes wrong. Maybe they lose two league games close together, maybe they dominate somebody and somehow draw 1-1, or maybe a tactical change gets ripped apart on Match of the Day and suddenly everyone starts asking whether Maresca is out of his depth.

Because under Guardiola, City's bad spells always came with this underlying assumption that he'd eventually fix it — an enormous psychological advantage. City could be eight points behind in February and you'd still look at the table thinking, yeah, but it's City. Does that feeling survive without Pep? Players notice it, opposition managers notice it, supporters notice it, and — importantly for anyone making predictions — we notice it too. We've spent years giving Manchester City the benefit of the doubt because Guardiola earned it. Maresca hasn't yet.

There's another possibility nobody should ignore.

Of course, the really annoying outcome for everyone hoping the Premier League becomes more unpredictable is that absolutely nothing changes. Maresca walks in, keeps the best bits of Guardiola's structure, tweaks a few things, City win loads of football matches, and by March we're all wondering why we spent August overthinking this. That's completely possible — City haven't handed the job to somebody unfamiliar with the environment. Maresca has already worked at the club, knows the footballing philosophy, and has experience managing in England, and City have also given him a contract through 2029, which hardly suggests they're treating this as some temporary bridge into the post-Guardiola era.

There's an argument that this might actually be one of the smoothest elite managerial transitions you could design. But we've seen enough football to know that replacing a legendary manager rarely works exactly as neatly as it looks on paper — football clubs aren't computer programmes, and you can't just install Pep Guardiola 2.0.

So where should you actually put City in your table?

This is where I'd resist the two obvious reactions. The first is pretending nothing has happened and automatically sticking City first because they're Manchester City; the second is going completely the other way and deciding Guardiola leaving means they're suddenly going to collapse. Both feel too easy. Maresca is taking over an elite squad inside a club whose footballing structure he already understands — that's a much better starting point than most new managers ever get. But he's also replacing the most successful manager in Manchester City's history, and Guardiola's departure isn't a normal managerial change; it ends a ten-year era in which he won 20 major trophies and fundamentally shaped how we think about the club. There has to be some uncertainty baked into your prediction.

For the first time in years, I'd probably move Manchester City out of the category of "assume they'll be in the title race until proven otherwise" and into "probably in the title race, but show me first." That sounds like a tiny distinction. It isn't. If Maresca gets it right straight away, City's machine keeps rolling and the rest of the league has a problem. If it takes him six months to properly establish himself, though, that's six months Arsenal, Liverpool, Chelsea or somebody else doesn't normally get. And if the first difficult spell exposes just how much of City's certainty came from Guardiola rather than the badge on the shirt, then the Premier League might suddenly be a lot more open than we've got used to.

For ten years, Pep Guardiola made predicting Manchester City boring. Enzo Maresca might be about to make them interesting again.

So before you automatically drag City into first place on your FulltimerFC prediction, stop for a second. Are you predicting Manchester City? Or are you still predicting Pep Guardiola's Manchester City? Because they're not the same thing anymore.