Predicted Starting Line-Up: Palermo vs Manchester City (Pre-Season Friendly) | OneFootball

Manchester City head out to Italy this weekend for their first and final public pre-season friendly against fellow City Football Group outfit, Palermo.

Pep Guardiola’s side return to action publicly for the first time since their relatively surprising defeat to Al Hilal at the FIFA Club World Cup earlier this summer, falling 3-4 to the Saudi Pro League club and exiting the competition at the last-16 stage.

The clash with Palermo in Italy comes most recently off the back of a narrow 1-0 win over Championship side Preston North End, held behind-closed-doors at the City Football Academy last weekend – Rico Lewis combining with Oscar Bobb to score the winning goal.

Manchester City have travelled to southern Italy with a 22-man squad list confirmed by the club on Friday afternoon: Ederson, Trafford; Lewis, Khusanov, Nunes, Dias, Akanji, Stones, Ake, Ait-Nouri, O’Reilly; Nico, Gundogan, Bernardo, Reijnders, Mukasa, Cherki; Bobb, Savinho, Marmoush, Haaland, Doku.

10 names were notably excluded from the roster, with James McAtee, Jack Grealish, and Stefan Ortega left out due to their ongoing transfer uncertainty. All of Rodri, Phil Foden, Josko Gvardiol, and Claudio Echeverri were deemed not fully-fit.

As for the injured list, a trio of names make up that segment of exclusions from the squad namely Mateo Kovacic, Kalvin Phillips, and Marcus Bettinelli.

Ahead of Manchester City’s upcoming pre-season friendly clash against Palermo, here is how we predict Pep Guardiola will line-up his side at the Renzo Barbera Stadium on Saturday evening!

Predicted XI

As is usually the case with pre-season friendlies, or even Manchester City’s run at the Club World Cup, Pep Guardiola’s line-ups are next to impossible to predict – particularly after the 54-year-old fielded two different elevens against Preston North End last time out.

Nevertheless, here is our entirely uneducated guess at proceedings from minute one, as we name James Trafford as the starting goalkeeper in what will be his Manchester City debut after returning to the club from Burnley earlier this summer.

Making up our first defensive unit of the new season, we anticipate that Matheus Nunes will take up the right-back role in the absence of a traditional option in the position amid strong transfer links to Newcastle United’s Tino Livramento throughout the summer.

Operating as the starting central defensive duo in our line-up will be a pairing of Abdukodir Khusanov and Nathan Ake, offering up a change in the roles for perhaps the second-half from Pep Guardiola.

Completing the defensive unit and starting out on the left side of the back-four will be Rayan Ait-Nouri, hoping to build upon a series of impressive performances in the United States earlier in the summer.

Moving into midfield and owing to the significant number of absentees from the travelling squad, we believe it could be a fluid double-pivot deployed by Pep Guardiola – with Tijjani Reijnders and Nico interchanging between the No.6 and No.8 roles.

Ahead of that duo and captaining Manchester City for this one will be the club’s most senior first-team leader, Bernardo Silva.

The Portugal international is likely to be offered support from two ‘wide’ players moving inside when able to, as we believe both Rayan Cherki and Omar Marmoush will start for Manchester City in this one.

That leaves the usual Erling Haaland to lead the line from a sole striker position.

Starting XI: Trafford; Nunes, Khusanov, Ake, Ait-Nouri; Reijnders, Nico, Bernardo; Cherki, Haaland, Marmoush.

Substitutes: Ederson, Lewis, Dias, Akanji, Stones, O’Reilly, Gundogan, Mukasa, Bobb, Savinho, Doku.