A stat tucked inside the match preview turns Enzo Maresca’s trip to Anfield into something more than a title-race fixture. Win on Sunday and Manchester City’s new manager becomes only the fourth man in Premier League history to open his tenure at a club with six straight league victories.

Carlo Ancelotti managed it at Chelsea. Pep Guardiola did it at City. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer joined them at Manchester United. That is the entire list.

City have won all five of their league matches under Maresca, the only side with a 100% record in the division. Maresca himself frames the run as even longer than that.

“For sure, it has been a good feeling, seven games, seven wins,” he told reporters on Thursday, counting Champions League nights alongside the league results.

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“Liverpool away and Paris Saint-Germain at home, two nice games. We work every day for these kinds of games, so we’re very excited for the next two games.”

Liverpool arrive wounded

Liverpool sit sixth on nine points, with three of their opening five games having ended in draws.

The injury list is long. Cody Gakpo, Hugo Ekitike, Conor Bradley, Federico Chiesa, Giovanni Leoni and Vitezslav Jaros are all unavailable, and Alexander Isak picked up a thigh problem while away with Sweden.

City are not quite at full strength either. Phil Foden is suspended following a red card against Manchester United, Nico O’Reilly is out, and Erling Haaland’s fitness is uncertain after he came off during Norway’s defeat to Portugal.

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The verdict shadowing the perfect record

Off the pitch, the story is a different one. An independent commission found City guilty on 29 September of breaching league financial rules across nine seasons between 2009 and 2018, ruling that the club had used sham contracts to inflate revenues by more than £900m.

City lodged their appeal on 1 October, calling the ruling unsafe and saying it contains “clear material errors, of law, principle and fact”. Points deductions, fines and even expulsion from the division would be available to the commission if the appeal fails.

Maresca has stuck to the pitch when asked about the case.

“They know what we can control is the football,” he said on Thursday.

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Under new league rules the appeal process must conclude within 12 weeks of lodging, which would push any sanctions decision into early 2027. For now the only numbers on the table are five wins from five, and a sixth that would put Maresca into a list of three.

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