Doku, Cherki and Ndiaye Are Leading Manchester City’s Dribbling Revolution

For a period, a popular narrative held that Manchester City under Pep Guardiola had little time for individual flair, prioritising positional structure and “the system” above one-on-one dribbling ability. Whether that was ever entirely fair is debatable, but there was a moment that seemed to support it.

When City signed Jérémy Doku from Rennes in 2023, he didn’t fit the mould many expected of a Guardiola winger. His game was built around beating defenders and racking up dribbles rather than end product, and his fit at a club built on passing and possession retention was widely questioned.

Doku has since answered those doubts emphatically, developing into one of the Premier League’s most effective one-on-one wingers, with his 2025-26 form suggesting he’s still improving. Where players like Jack Grealish are often seen as having had their individualism curbed at City, Doku’s game looks strikingly similar to Grealish’s — just executed with greater maturity.

City didn’t stop there. Rayan Cherki arrived last year as, arguably, an even bigger risk-taker than Doku, and enjoyed an excellent debut Premier League campaign. Antoine Semenyo, another dribble-heavy forward, joined in January from Bournemouth. Now, City have completed the £65 million move for Iliman Ndiaye from Everton — a signing that will give the club a genuinely formidable group of ball-carrying attackers, even before factoring in Phil Foden’s own dribbling quality and the arrival of Allan, another new signing prized for his carrying ability.

Guardiola has since departed, with Enzo Maresca now in charge, but the club’s recruitment philosophy in this area appears unchanged.

The Numbers Behind the Trend

As Ndiaye’s move from Everton is official, City will own three of the Premier League’s top dribblers from the 2025-26 season by attempted take-ons, and four of the division’s top eight for dribbles actually completed.

Elliot Anderson, one of City’s other summer signings, wasn’t far behind Cherki either, completing 50 dribbles himself — though he needed close to double the minutes on the pitch to get there, making him considerably less efficient in this particular metric than his new teammate.

Taken together, it’s hard to view this concentration of ball-carrying talent as accidental.

A Deliberate Shift, Not a Contradiction

Guardiola himself once suggested that the “future of football” might move away from possession dominance and towards more transitional, direct styles of play. Signings like Doku, Cherki, Semenyo and potentially Ndiaye can be read as part of that evolution — or at the very least, as a way of making City’s attack less predictable.

Dribblers introduce an element of chaos that structured passing moves sometimes can’t. That matters for a team like City, who are frequently required to break down deep, compact defensive setups. Last season, City spent 23.4% of their build-up possession facing a low block — the third-highest proportion of any side in the Premier League.

Against that kind of resistance, a lengthy passing sequence isn’t always the most efficient route through. A single moment of individual skill from a player like Ndiaye can sometimes unlock a defence far more quickly than a string of extra passes ever could.

None of this suggests City are abandoning Guardiola’s possession-based principles altogether. Rather, recent recruitment looks like an attempt to diversify how the team creates danger, giving Maresca more than one way to break teams down.

It’s Not Actually New

Despite the perception that dribbling and Guardiola’s football were at odds, his own early instructions to City’s recruitment staff reportedly asked them to find players who could dribble. History backs that up, too — several of his title-winning City sides featured heavy volumes of take-ons.

In each of those title-winning campaigns, City ranked among the division’s top six sides for total dribble attempts. Outside of those specific seasons, though, there’s been little clear correlation between dribbling volume and silverware for City — meaning this current buildup of ball-carrying talent doesn’t guarantee anything on its own.

City’s Growing Collection

Manchester City certainly aren’t the only Premier League club to value dribblers, but if Ndiaye’s move goes through, it would be difficult to find a squad anywhere in the division with a deeper concentration of one-on-one attacking talent.

Between homegrown talent like Foden and a string of dribble-first recruits, Maresca inherits — and continues to build — a squad with an unusually broad range of ways to beat defenders one-on-one, whether or not that was originally the plan under Guardiola.

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