Man City Looking for Biggest Summer Transfer Window Yet

After a devastating season by Manchester City standards, the club is all out to make amends for its lineup and get back on top. 

Fans with Man City tickets were on the edge until the end of the league as the team needed to finish within the top 5 to qualify for the Champions League next season. 

Now that this hurdle is out of the City are out to get the stars. And one player on the list is Rayan Ait-Nouri. 

City Want Ait-Nouri

Manchester City are pursuing a deal to sign Rayan Ait-Nouri from Wolverhampton Wanderers.

Agreements still need to be reached between the clubs and with the 23-year-old — however, all parties now expect a move to happen.

Ait-Nouri has emerged as City’s top target to strengthen at left-back after four impressive seasons since joining Wolves on a permanent basis from Angers following a loan spell.

Central defender Josko Gvardiol was City’s most regular left-back before academy graduate midfielder Nico O’Reilly impressed in the position over the campaign’s final months.

City is next in action at the Club World Cup in the United States, where they will face Wydad AC, Al Ain, and Juventus in Group G of the newly expanded competition.

Ait-Nouri has made 157 appearances for Wolves since joining, initially on loan, in 2020. He made 41 appearances in all competitions this season, scoring five goals and adding seven assists.

The Midlands club are already losing one key first-team player this summer, with Matheus Cunha’s impending move to Manchester United confirmed on Sunday.

Ait-Nouri stood out as a consistent creative presence for Wolves last season. From his high-and-wide left wing-back role, he took the most touches in the attacking third and registered the most assists (7) of any player on the team.

He stepped up in the absence of Matheus Cunha as the team strung together six successive wins to help them to safety, providing a goal and an assist against Tottenham and creating five chances against Ipswich, a constant threat with his curling left-footed crosses and positive running down the flank. 

Only 10 Premier League players attempted more take-ons last season. The Wolves fans from the secondary ticket marketplace have always had good things about the youngster, and seeing him go might be a big miss for the club. 

There is clearly more to Ait-Nouri’s game than classic wing-back play. However, he is a technical, two-footed player capable of playing a variety of different roles. 

He drove through the centre of the pitch and slipped a pass through to Cunha for an early-season assist against Chelsea, chopped inside and found an incisive right-footed pass against Tottenham in December, and even stepped in to play a No 10 role under Gary O’Neil last season.

Think of Ait-Nouri as a Joao Cancelo-type full-back: a maverick in possession, inventive, good in tight spaces, and able to play in the pockets or out wide in a flexible Pep Guardiola team. 

He gives City attacking variety and more conviction than their wingers have been able to offer in the final third this season, and for that, is an attractive proposition, even if there are concerns around his concentration in defence.

If City complete a deal for Ait-Nouri, they will land a player of huge ability but also one who still remains raw, especially as a full-back in a back four, after four years in the Premier League.

The Algeria international’s best performances for Wolves have come almost exclusively from a wing-back position outside three central defenders, where his explosive and unpredictable attacking strengths can shine and his defensive naivety and positional weaknesses can be hidden more effectively.

Ait-Nouri loves to show off his massive array of tricks and flicks, sometimes to the annoyance of his coaches. 

For example, in the final few weeks of last season, once Wolves had secured Premier League survival, he turned ‘showreel mode’ up to maximum. As a result, he became a less effective player, such as on the final day of the season when his overplaying handed Brentford a goal.

City Sign Tijjani Reijnders

Manchester City and AC Milan have agreed a £46.3m (€55m) deal to sign Tijjani Reijnders.

The midfielder is expected to have a medical degree at City before putting pen to paper on a five-year deal at the Etihad.

Reijnders is a Netherlands international with the most goals and assists of any midfielder in Serie A last season.

He was a bright spark in a disappointing season for Milan, who only finished eighth in Serie A, missing out on European qualification.

The 26-year-old, who joined the Italian giants from AZ Alkmaar in the summer of 2023, scored 15 goals in 2024-25 and will bolster Pep Guardiola’s midfield options following the departure of Kevin De Bruyne.

Man City chairman Kaldoon Al-Mubarak said last week that he believes the club should have been more aggressive in the transfer market last summer.

Al-Mubarak admitted the club did not end up “anywhere near” achieving its goals in 2024/25 but said lessons were learned from its disappointing season.

Having won four of the last five Premier League titles, City was essentially out of the race by the end of November and ended up without a single major trophy for the first time since 2016/17, Pep Guardiola’s first season in charge. This was a big blow for the fans with Man City tickets, who’ve gotten into the habit of winning under the Spanish coach. 

Fans in the secondary ticket marketplace echoed that the 2024/25 season was a tough reality check, and they believe the club chairman shares their sentiment. 

In his annual post-season interview, he told the club website: “There’s been a lot of challenges that we’ve, I’ve never dealt with personally, professionally, over these last 17 years combined.

“And the culmination of that is an experience that I believe will be invaluable for us going forward.

“This year is another year where I think when I look back, last summer, we probably should have been more aggressive in some of the changes we needed to do.

“We didn’t do that, which ended up costing us money this year. We started rebuilding this team in January.

“Normally, we like to do our business in the summer, and only in case of emergency or a special need do we actually go and do business in January.

“That’s been our MO for at least seven or eight years. But this January, we had to act.”

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