Akanji 'not Man City's fifth-choice centre-back' after Dortmund transfer
FT Desk
- 12 Sept 2022 19:37 BST
- 3 min read
Manuel Akanji was something of a surprise transfer from Borussia Dortmund to Manchester City this summer, but he says he is not at the Etihad just to make up the numbers.
Akanji knows all about numbers, his mental arithmetic making for some compelling viewing online. But one figure few saw coming was the €17.3 million City paid for his services at the end of the recent transfer window.
Akanji would have been on a free at the end of the season, and he had fallen out of favour at Dortmund, with the club signing Germany international centre-backs Niklas Sule and Nico Schlotterbeck from Bayern Munich and Freiburg respectively this summer.
Manuel Akanji is a maths genius 🧠pic.twitter.com/yOc0wJiDBz
— Football Transfers (@Transfersdotcom) September 1, 2022
But Pep Guardiola apparently saw something in Akanji that Edin Terzic and others at Dortmund had missed.
"[Manchester City] told me that we don't have a No. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5," Akanji told the Athletic. "We're all players in that position and the guys who train best and play the best are going to play."
'Guardiola will make changes'
"Guardiola will make changes because if he plays the same team every game there will be problems - your body just can't do it."
Akanji is the fourth former Dortmund player in the City squad following Erling Haaland, Ilkay Gundogan and Sergio Gomez, the young left-back who arrived via Anderlecht this summer. Jadon Sancho, across town at Manchester United, is another former teammate.
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"I'm in touch with Jadon a lot," Akanji said. "With Erling, I spoke before I came here obviously, we also stayed in touch when he left [Borussia Dormund].
"They told me here I'll learn a lot in training because the intensity is so high that it makes it a lot harder. It's not like we are doing different exercises from Dortmund, but the quality and intensity makes it so much higher.
"It's hard and that shows you can get used to the Premier League. I think that it's a lot faster than in Germany."
