Sitting with reporters in Seoul during Manchester City’s Asia tour, Maresca was asked how his old rule about captains and goals would work if Haaland were the one in charge.
“That is a good one,” he replied. “If the captain scores, then he can celebrate. If Erling is the captain, f***ing hell! We have a problem, can you imagine?”
The rule Maresca was talking about is not new. He has hauled it from job to job. At Leicester, then at Chelsea, he insisted his captain peel away from the celebrations after every goal and jog to the bench for instructions.
“When we scored, the captain had to come to the bench, not to celebrate, for instructions,” he told reporters.
The tactic under the joke
Buried in the punchline is a coaching habit Maresca is trying to import into City wholesale. The example he reached for came from a pre-season friendly played the previous Wednesday, when Ruben Dias trotted to the sideline early on.
“If you saw in the game here on Wednesday, Ruben came over to the bench,” he said. “I think even if it is two or three minutes in, there is always something to adjust.”
That is a different rhythm from the one Pep Guardiola set at the Etihad. For most of the previous decade, City’s captaincy was decided by a squad vote and Guardiola stayed out of it. Maresca, who took over from Guardiola on 29 June, wants to pick the leadership group himself and use the captain as a live conduit to the touchline.
Then he named Haaland one of the leaders anyway
Which makes what happened next slightly awkward.
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Days after the Seoul quotes, on 16 August, Maresca confirmed his interim captains group. Haaland was in it, alongside Dias, with the manager saying he would wait for the transfer window to close before naming two more.
“At the moment it is Ruben and Erling,” Maresca said, “and I want to wait until the end of the transfer window and pick two more.”
If Haaland ever ends up wearing the armband as primary captain, presumably the touchline jog falls on whichever of the group hasn’t just scored. The alternative is City’s most reliable scorer sprinting to the touchline and back several dozen times a season, which, as Maresca himself pointed out, would be a problem you could imagine.
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