Manchester City ended a season that brought two trophies and a late push on Arsenal with one clear regret: the Champions League. For Nico Gonzalez, that disappointment came with a far more personal cost, because a year that began with promise closed with him out of matchday squads and missing the FA Cup final entirely.
That is why City’s summer decisions already matter. Pep Guardiola spent the final two months of the campaign with a settled best XI and made few changes, and the effect was felt well beyond the starting team. Bernardo Silva is the only member of that preferred side who is not set to stay for the new manager, while others around the squad finished with almost nothing to show for the run-in except frustration.
Gonzalez’s case is stark. He made 15 consecutive starts earlier in the season after arriving for £49m eighteen months ago, but by the end he was left out of squads altogether. He had scored the winner in the FA Cup semi-final, then watched the final from elsewhere, a brutal swing for a midfielder who still does not really have a role in the squad.
The same pattern reached other players too. Savinho had another frustrating campaign, failed to make Brazil’s 55-man longlist for the World Cup and has already drawn interest from Tottenham for a second straight summer, with City not immediately turning them away. Trafford, meanwhile, was displaced as No.1 after three league games, still collected two trophies at Wembley as City’s cup keeper and earned a World Cup spot with England as third-choice goalkeeper, but he has been thinking about an exit for some time because he wants to be No.1 for club and country.
There is a reason the Champions League remains the headline failure even in a season with silverware. Guardiola won two trophies and kept City in Arsenal’s wake until the final week of the league, but his reluctance to rotate left several players with reduced minutes and unresolved futures. Savinho, Trafford and Gonzalez now face the same question from different angles: whether they stay and fight for a place that has been hard to win, or move on before another season passes them by.
