Maresca faces disrupted pre-season, Community Shield opener and 115 charges as City reign begins

Enzo Maresca will begin his tenure as Manchester City manager without the luxury of a settled pre-season, facing a compressed schedule, a depleted squad and the ongoing backdrop of the club’s 115 Premier League charges.

The bulk of City’s senior players, whose seasons began as far back as last summer’s Club World Cup, will spend a significant portion of the close season on international duty at the World Cup in the United States. When Maresca does assemble a touring group, it is unlikely to feature most of those players, and the pre-season destination in Asia brings its own complications — extreme heat and humidity make it difficult to build meaningful patterns in training or in matches, even if there are sound commercial reasons for the trip.

City return from that tour with little time before heading to Cardiff to face Arsenal in the Community Shield. Renewing that rivalry in the season’s first competitive fixture — with silverware on the line — is a demanding way to open a new managerial era. A week later, the Premier League begins, and with the fixture list still to be announced, City will be hoping for a gentle opening run.

Maresca, however, has rarely been afforded easy circumstances. He served as Pep Guardiola’s assistant at City when the 115 charges were first filed, then took charge of Leicester the following season while the club was dealing with PSR breaches. His first campaign at Chelsea required him to manage Premier League commitments alongside Conference League football on Thursday evenings. The season after, despite reaching the Champions League, Chelsea were drawn to travel to Azerbaijan and went on to win the Club World Cup in the United States — all while the club faced a separate raft of FA charges relating to its previous ownership.

That the 44-year-old delivered results through each of those periods is the clearest evidence City have that their new head coach can separate off-pitch noise from on-pitch performance. That ability will be tested almost immediately as the club attempts to launch a new era under the most demanding of opening conditions.