Belgian international Vincent Kompany made a surprise announcement this past week as he revealed his decision to leave Premier League champions Manchester City after 11 years and 360 appearances. The four-time Premier League champion is set to return to Anderlecht where he will work as player-manager from next season.
Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola will have an extremely difficult task of replacing the central defender and has already been linked to a Premier League defender, Leicester City’s Harry Maguire, as per a report.
The report suggests that Manchester City will have to pay more than the £75 million that Liverpool paid for Virgil van Dijk with Maguire sitting on a five-year contract with the Foxes which he signed last year.
Maguire is likely to be Guardiola’s No. 1 target to replace the former Manchester City captain as the domestic treble winners will try to dominate English football once again next season and look to go further in Europe.
Neighbours Manchester United, who need wholesale changes in the summer, were also linked with the English central defender, who moved to Leicester City from Hull City in 2017 for £12 million.
Is Maguire the right choice for Pep Guardiola?
Maguire has put in consistently good performances for Leicester City over the last two seasons in the Premier League, becoming an integral player for the Foxes.
The Englishman is a leader at the back, with the ability to push forward with the ball out of defence. Maguire is also a tall figure at the back, and great in the air, a quality that Guardiola will want in his team next season as he admitted that they are weak from set pieces and are lacking tall players in the box.
Maguire completed 85.6% of his passes this season in the league, with an average of 6 long balls to the attackers from defence.
A mature, calm and steady figure at the back, Maguire will only improve, that too under a manager like Pep Guardiola. The Catalan manager’s first-choice centre-back was Aymeric Laporte in the recently concluded season, while John Stones, Vincent Kompany and Nicolas Otamendi played bit-part roles at the heart of the backline.
Maguire has also become an important figure for the English national team, displaying his capability of playing in a two-man or a three-man defence and developing as a central figure in the national set-up under Gareth Southgate.