Farewell Riyad Mahrez - an often underappreciated performer for Guardiola's City (2024)

After 48 hours of speculation and the type of silly concern that only a football pre-season can cause, there is just one player absent from Manchester City’s trip to Asia: Riyad Mahrez.

The winger is instead flying to the Middle East to complete his move to Al Ahli, something that had been expected but still had an air of mysticism around it. When it was announced that Mahrez would not be joining his team-mates, nobody knew exactly who else would or would not be on that flight to Tokyo.

City did not post any pre-season training content on their social media channels on Monday or Tuesday, not even players returning to the building let alone training action. Rumours circulated that several players, including all of those who have a higher chance of leaving this summer — Mahrez, Kyle Walker, Aymeric Laporte, Joao Cancelo and Bernardo Silva — were nowhere to be seen.

There was further confusion when Nathan Ake, Manuel Akanji and Kevin De Bruyne were pictured training In Ibiza — especially as De Bruyne suffered a serious hamstring injury in the Champions League final.

The reality was that the first two days of training were essentially optional, with players free to report back at any point as long as they were on the plane. On Tuesday, one Twitter user posted a picture of Rodri waiting for his bags at Leeds Bradford Airport following a flight from Ibiza. Many of them, like Jack Grealish and Kalvin Phillips, have been training on their own long before this week.

Ultimately, the only one with a transfer close to completion is Mahrez, with his five years at City coming to an end.

𝑯𝒐𝒘'𝒔 𝒚𝒐𝒖𝒓 𝒕𝒐𝒖𝒄𝒉? 😏

Sit back and enjoy three minutes of Mahrez magic! 👇🇩🇿 pic.twitter.com/ArDCqdGohN

— Manchester City (@ManCity) March 25, 2022

Most of the players to have left City in recent years — such as Sergio Aguero, Fernandinho and Ilkay Gundogan — have been there for a decade, or close to it, and so any appraisals of their time at the Etihad Stadium have included grand changes at the club and their role in it, about bonds with supporters that can never be broken.

It is slightly different for Mahrez, not just owing to his comparatively short time at the club.

Make no mistake, he has been a fine player for City during a glorious era, contributing more than he is probably given credit for.

He had the usual difficult first season in 2018-19: in and out of the team, not showing his best form and, therefore, provoking questions about his suitability to City’s style. He had been the main man at Leicester City, always the one they looked to, but now he was just another top player — the Grealish of his day.

But then his City career took off, and the numbers back it up. The 2019-20 campaign was, at times, a tough watch for City fans compared to the two before it and the three since. The play was comparatively stodgy, with Pep Guardiola slowing things down to protect a flaky defence. The creative burden often fell to De Bruyne, in his role as a lone No 10, but Mahrez was there with him, providing more chances from open play (50) and set pieces (10) than anybody but the Belgian. He scored 11 goals and added nine assists in the Premier League, showing that he could make a contribution even when — by City’s standards — things were difficult.

And in the next two years — when City largely played without a striker — he scored 20 goals and registered 11 assists in the league, creating 67 chances from open play and 16 from set pieces. Crucially, he started 38 games across those two seasons (exactly half the matches), fewer than anybody else in those attacking areas, other than the injured Aguero.

As a result, his goals per 90 is higher than anybody else bar Aguero (who scored four goals in just seven starts), his assists per 90 is the highest in the squad, and his chances created from open play and set plays per 90 are higher than anybody bar De Bruyne. In an era when City needed goals from all over the pitch, Mahrez certainly did his bit.

That was the case in Europe, too: in the same two-year period, he scored more goals (11) than any of his team-mates, got four assists and created more chances than anybody apart from De Bruyne. In the semi-finals against Paris Saint-Germain in 2020-21, he scored three of City’s four goals, across both legs, to send his side through to the final for the first time in their history.

But as City reached the final again in 2022-23, he was watching from the sidelines. Guardiola often says that the toughest part of his job is telling players that they are not starting, and those close to him say he has rarely found it tougher than when it comes to Mahrez. In the big games, the City boss cherishes Bernardo’s presence on the right wing, for his ability without the ball as much as with it, and it means that Mahrez has frequently been the one to miss out despite having done little to deserve it. In fact, after the World Cup, he was one of the club’s few reliable performers, but it was not enough to get him in the side come the crunch.

“He’s grumpy with me when he doesn’t play, all the time,” Guardiola said when Mahrez made his point with a hat-trick in the FA Cup semi-final at Wembley. “He makes me notice when he’s grumpy.”

In January, Guardiola heralded Mahrez’s fine form after the World Cup by revealing that his attitude was better in training than at the start of the season and that, when he came off the bench in that period, he affected the team positively as opposed to a game against Aston Villa in September when he suggested the team ‘dropped’ after he came on. It was progress of sorts given that Mahrez had been left out of the squad altogether for complaining during his first season at City.

Generally, though, whenever Mahrez came into the team or came off the bench, City certainly looked no worse off and he often scored or created a goal, something which may only be fully appreciated once he has gone.

After the FA Cup semi-final, Guardiola also said that he had “lost the battle to make him understand how important he is for the group,” and that really was true in both senses.

Firstly, he really was important to City. Never mind those early concerns about him adapting to City’s style — eventually, they adapted to him. Of course, he changed his game — his defensive work rate improved markedly over the years and he better understood when to release the ball — but when it comes to what Guardiola wants from his wingers these days, it is what Mahrez provides: lots of touches, top-class close control, a great first touch (elite in Mahrez’s case) and an ability to work in small spaces.

Wingers who like to play one-twos and run in behind are not in Guardiola’s thinking at the moment as he still tries to find the right balance in his team given Erling Haaland’s brash presence up front. Mahrez (and Grealish) have exactly what he wants.

Guardiola was also proven right to have said he lost the battle. Leaving Mahrez on the bench was not done lightly, especially in the FA Cup and Champions League finals, but the Algerian was bitterly disappointed to have missed out on both. As his team-mates celebrated winning the FA Cup at Wembley, he was seen apart from the group and he was in a foul mood for the rest of the night.

With Al Ahli desperate to sign him and make him their star arrival of the summer, he would have felt more appreciation than he might have at City, even if Guardiola did his best — the City boss did not want him to leave, either.

It would not be fair to say that Mahrez’s impending exit has split the fanbase, but there are certainly a number of City supporters who are not especially upset, or indeed bothered at all, about him leaving, despite his undoubted value to the team over the years.

There are a few different reasons for that. During his first season at the club, there was a home game against West Ham when the Etihad crowd were audibly frustrated by his twists and turns on the right wing. At that point, he had not fully adapted to City, still taking too many touches even while his team-mates in the middle had made their runs. It looked like a clash of styles initially and he was labelled greedy, a tag that is difficult to shake off in the bubble that is supporting a football club. Even his team-mates took him to one side at the start of the 2020-21 season, his third at the club and one of his best, to ask him to release the ball sooner.

Long before that, he had missed a penalty at Anfield that would have surely handed City victory, which would have been their first there for 16 years. Taking the ball from Gabriel Jesus and blazing it over the bar is a crime that has not been forgiven by some — or at the very least it colours judgement of his penalty record for City, which was very good since that day: 13 scored, three more missed.

Granted, one of those misses came in a 2-2 draw with West Ham in the penultimate game of the 2021-22 season, and given the context of yet another vanishingly close title race with Liverpool, it brought back a lot of bad memories.

These things, of course, should be easy to overlook given the bigger picture, but for some reason are not. Perhaps the fact that he does very few interviews or that he does not have funny viral clips — like Haaland’s Yorkshire impressions — means people do not have any other identities to attach themselves to, just the supposed greedy winger who misses penalties.

Perhaps his race and faith play into that — maybe those Haaland clips are easier to relate to because he is a white European rather than a North African Muslim. Of course, that will not be a factor for many, but it cannot be overlooked as one reason why he has maybe not been given the love that a player with his contributions would ordinarily receive and deserve.

Whatever the reasons, it is certainly strange to see some fans who have not taken to Mahrez still pushing for the return of Leroy Sane, a player who lit up the Etihad on his best days but undoubtedly made less of a contribution than Mahrez, and was nowhere near as consistent.

Goodbye then, Riyad Mahrez. It feels like we barely knew ye.

(Top photo: Tom Flathers/Manchester City FC via Getty Images)

Sam Lee is the Manchester City correspondent for The Athletic. The 2020-21 campaign will be his sixth following the club, having previously held other positions with Goal and the BBC, and freelancing in South America. Follow Sam on Twitter @SamLee