“Enzo Maresca is a brilliant manager. He is somebody who has worked at the City Football Group before. He was one of Pep Guardiola’s assistants when City won the treble.

“He did a really good job at Leicester, winning the Championship there and getting them promoted. The players there loved him – looked at what’s happened to Leicester since he left. 

“By and large, he did a good job at Chelsea as well. You can’t look back at his time at Chelsea and say it was a complete success. There were lots of ups and downs, but in his first full season in charge, Chelsea qualified for the Champions League, winning the Conference League and winning the Club World Cup.

“It’s been an open secret that if Guardiola is going to leave Man City, then Maresca would be the person who would be taking over.

“He plays a similar kind of football [to Guardiola]. He is very into possession, positional play, very technical. Some of his former players have described him as someone who coaches a football team as if he’s playing chess.

“He’s incredibly hard working, he spends most of his life at the training ground, pouring over data and statistics, watching games from the past.

“Also, one on one in a big game, he’s one of the best managers in the business. At the Club World Cup final this summer when Chelsea played PSG, it was a full-strength PSG with Luis Enrique in the dugout and they did not know what had hit them because Maresca had come up with such a great plan of how to beat PSG.

“If he gets the Man City job, he is somebody who can be a great success there. Obviously it’s going to be difficult to follow Guardiola, but he has what it takes to do that.

“It’s not going to be plain sailing if Guardiola decides he’s leaving, if Man City decide that they want Maresca. It won’t be as easy as picking up the phone and getting him because he’s still contractually tied to Chelsea.

“When he left Chelsea at the start of this year, he still had around three years left on his contract and his departure was very acrimonious. I imagine that lawyers are involved and they would need to get involved again if he was to move to Man City.”

Analysis from Sky Sports News