On March 3, a few hours before the twelfth Manchester derby of Phil Foden’s career, The Independent public an article in which it is explained how the boy from Stockport became a player “of inestimable value” in Pep Guardiola’s City. And precisely in the season in which the Catalan coach had to deal with De Bruyne’s injury and some unexpected scoring blackouts from Haaland: «One of the tests that every great talent must face concerns the impact he manages to exert when he is in field. Foden has become a much faster and more explosive player than he was when he was nicknamed The Stockport Iniesta and is much more present inside the penalty area. And what’s more, he is taking on much more responsibility.”
That afternoon Foden took less than an hour of play to confirm these words, to demonstrate how necessary his presence is within the most sophisticated gaming system in the world: first the equalizer with the shot from outside the area to the crossing the posts by cutting the ball and chain from the right towards the centre, then the 2-1 goal, closing with a furious insertion without the ball an action that he himself had started with a vertical touch capable of cutting two of the three lines United’s defence. In post-match interviews Guardiola says that «Phil Foden is the best player in the Premier League this season. He has an incredible work ethic, no matter the position he is in: he can play right, centre, left, cut inside and score from any position. He never complains and now he is also someone who wins matches.”
Two and a half months after that match which established him as leader of the first team in history to win the Premier League four times in a row, Foden was actually nominated Player of the Season. Between the motivations of the various panelists who preferred him to the other candidates (Haaland, Isak, Odegaard, Rice, Palmer, Van Dijk and Watkins), are particularly striking those of Mark Schwarzer, the Australian goalkeeper who for almost twenty years (from 1997 to 2016) lived as a protagonist phases that have led the English championship to be considered the best there is: «Phil Foden has evolved into one of the most exciting players on the planet. When he has the ball at his feet you always think that he can make the impossible possible. And then who wouldn’t want to see someone like that play all the time?”
The day after the announcement, in the last league match against West Ham, Foden wanted to legitimize his new status as must watch at any cost. And it took him just under twenty minutes to personally close a title race in which if City was, once again, the team that couldn’t lose (21 games without defeat since 6 December) it was thanks to him and that frightening continuity of performance that allowed him to put together the goals that Haaland was unable to score and the assists that De Bruyne was unable to do. Less than two minutes after the kick-off, yet another goal arrived from outside the area – the sixth in the Premier League, the tenth of the season – with the usual conclusion into the top corner prepared by the usual sumptuous oriented control which places the ball on that which is now considered his tilereplicating the masterpiece he had already uncovered in the Champions League at the Bernabéu against Real; then, in the 18th minute, the 2-0 goal from the area center forward, a first-time inside left shot facilitated by cutback pass cut and sharp by Jeremy Doku.
Foden decided the decisive match of the season in which he was most decisive
For some time now the focus of the debate regarding Foden has shifted from the mere statistical data (27 goals and 11 assists in all competitions, 19 and 8 in the league alone) to the way in which Guardiola managed to build his new total offensive weapon starting from a situation of potential unplaceability, in which almost no he knew what to do with a player he was at one time free 8 And false new, midfielder and attacking midfielder, creator and finisher. Also for this reason, it can be said that Pep has created yet another masterpiece: in today’s Manchester City, Foden is probably the only all-rounder with specialist duties, a new technical specimen generated by the need to put the pitch and the player at the centre. game – a footballer capable of taking the concept of creating numerical and positional superiority with and without the ball to another level.
We all noticed it on the evening of November 28th, during the second half of the match between City and Red Bull Leipzig. With his team 2-0 down at half-time, Guardiola draws a very unscrupulous 3-1-4-2 by inserting Julián Álvarez and Doku in place of Grealish and Kyle Walker and effectively giving up the double pivot as Akanji climbs arm in arm on the right and Rodri is entrusted with the task of almost single-handedly screening the central area of the pitch when not in possession. In what is, to all intents and purposes, an extreme attempt at total occupation of the opponent’s half of the pitch, Foden becomes the key player in the entire attacking phase due to his ability to generate chances from nothing, to see corridors and passing lines even when the spaces are narrowed due to the density that is created in the ball area: one of these is attacked by Haaland, served on the run with a touch from the outside that cuts off the two central defenders and allows the Norwegian to take the two meters of advantage that he needs to control and hit the net with a flat left foot inside the penalty area. Fifteen minutes later Foden takes advantage of the quality and technical clarity of his fundamentals to score one of those goals in which everything seems to happen at two speeds, his and that of everyone else around him. The action develops on the left, with Doku’s movement without the ball allowing Gvardiol to carry the ball almost to the edge of the penalty area: the horizontal pass that catches Simakan off the clock is probably too strong for the ball to be played again immediately, but Foden somehow manages to cushion it with the inside of his right foot and bring it forward with his left, grouping two movements into one and finding himself in front of the goal in a fraction of a second. At that point Blaswich is beaten even before the number 47 scores with the equivalent of a putter passing under Klostermann’s legs and slipping, lightly and uncatchable, into the corner to his left. Then, when there are less than five minutes left until the final whistle, Foden performs yet another essay on the importance of first-oriented control in difficult situations: Doku’s pass is soiled by Simakan’s touch and yet, just when it seems that he has the ball now overcome, Foden returns to Stockport’s Iniesta for a moment and hooks him with his prehensile left foot, in such a way that the assist for Álvarez’s 3-2 goal seems like the least important detail of the entire action.
Everything so simple, everything so Fodenwho from that evening became the master of the team: 20 goals and 6 assists in the next 32 games, as if someone had unlocked the cheat codes of the individual and collective unplayability that led City to win the championship (and perhaps the FA Cup) even in a season in which Liverpool and Arsenal seemed to have more in terms of technical and mental lightness.
In other words: Foden knows how to change games
To get to what constitutes the first true apex performance of his career, Foden had to deal with Guardiola’s intransigence regarding the path that starts from «he is one of the best I have ever coached» and then arrives at «he will be a legendary player for the number of matches that he will play, for the goals he will score, for the trophies he will win”, without for once the coach’s usual verbal hyperbole seeming redundant or exaggerated.
Over the years there have always been press conferences in which Guardiola did not fail to underline that Foden “can play in five positions: striker, left wing, right wing, attacking midfielder, midfielder”: the first time was in April 2021 in the role final of a season of over 2500 minutes played (mostly as a supersub during the race) which would have consecrated him Young Player of The Year; the second occurred a year later, in May 2022, the day after he provided two assists in a 4-0 against Jesse Marsch’s Leeds, acting as a possession midfielder with the task of making the action progress vertically; the last one last August, a few months after the legendary one Treble closed by the Champions League victory in Istanbul against Inter, a feat to which Foden, in the common perception, had contributed in a rather marginal way. On the contrary the missed opportunity in the 75th minute of the final – a weak left foot comfortably blocked to the ground by Onana after having broken two lines of pressure with the usual sumptuous control to follow with his back to the goal – looked a lot like the proverbial nutshell inside which contained the projection of what we thought was Foden, that is a player who is aesthetically pleasing but superfluous, unnecessary, even smoky in the intermittent displays of his talent.
In the aforementioned statement from last August, however, Guardiola anticipates what will be a turnaround imposed by the change in position, tasks and functions: «It’s true that he can play in all those positions but I believe that in the middle of the pitch he can do something truly special, even if he needs time to react from a defensive point of view. Playing more in that area of the pitch could also help him from this point of view.” He uses the conditional, Pep, but in reality he has already decided. And De Bruyne’s injury, as well as the farewells of Gündoğan and Mahrez, do nothing but accelerate a process that is already underway. Foden becomes the triune player of City’s attack, the one through whom everything passes and through whom everything flows, the one who can never be given up – 52 appearances in total, 47 as a starter, 87% of the total minutes played – because he has the task of making the action progress vertically towards Haaland, of cleaning the ball from the impurities of the construction from below when it is not carried out in the right ways and at the right times, of creating connections and passing lines starting from the outside and then finding itself alone the best zone of influence to exercise a technical and psychological superiority that goes beyond the single play.
On 25 April, in the away match against Roberto De Zerbi’s Brighton, Foden was deployed as a left winger in a 4-1-4-1 which made City look like a sort of glass in which Álvarez was the olive in the martini «shaken but not stirred» in the manner of James Bond. The not-so-secret ingredient of the cocktail, however, is Foden which is everywhere and nowhere, elusive and elusive for anyone who tries to keep up with him: between the 17th and the 34th he starts the action of De Bruyne’s first goal and scores the second and third goals almost without having to force himself, as if the ball was going towards him as a direct extension of his foot. At the end of the match Guardiola says that «it’s a matter of time but he can still improve a lot after having already improved compared to last season and compared to previous ones», especially for the speed of action and reaction: «I too would like to see him always go to the maximum every time he has the ball at his feet, but then he would risk being less precise and less effective: sometimes it is necessary to slow down and understand which are the moments in which to be more aggressive and which, instead, to be more calm”.
The impression we got from the second part of the season, however, is that Foden has already reached this point, as if having played in all five roles of the system had opened the doors to his knowledge of everything that happens on the pitch: seeing him play today means exactly this, it means seeing a footballer who is able to bend the space-time dimension in which a single match takes place to his will. Because nothing escapes him, nothing can surprise him, nothing can be denied him. Much less win a Premier League as the best player of the best team in the world. There her team, finally.
