Enzo Maresca's first competitive match in charge of Manchester City could hardly have gone worse. Arsenal tore into his new side from the opening whistle at Cardiff's Principality Stadium on Sunday, closing out a 3-0 win in the Community Shield, and the Italian did not try to soften the verdict afterwards. "I'm always worried, even when we win," he said, in comments carried by ONE and City's own channels. "We're only at the beginning."
The traditional curtain-raiser between the Premier League champions and the FA Cup holders pitted last season's title winners, Arsenal, against a City side already being reshaped under its new head coach. Mikel Arteta's team made the stronger case for the shirt in every sense.
Riccardo Calafiori needed just 23 seconds to put Arsenal ahead, meeting Myles Lewis-Skelly's threaded pass on the edge of the box and finishing into the bottom corner — one of the fastest goals in the fixture's history and about as brutal a start as a new manager could suffer.
City responded with three or four decent openings of their own before falling further behind, but could not convert them. Kai Havertz doubled Arsenal's lead in the 28th minute, and Martin Ødegaard, named player of the match, completed the scoring early in the second half to seal a comfortable afternoon for the champions.
Maresca, addressing reporters afterwards, singled out City's failure to close down the ball after Arsenal's second: "I didn't like the first goal we conceded at all, and on the second goal we simply didn't apply any pressure on the ball carrier," he said, according to ONE's report from the post-match press conference.
He also pointed to the disrupted preparation many of his players had going into the game. City fielded four players who had returned from this summer's World Cup with only two or three training sessions behind them, and Maresca said the plan had been to substitute all of them by half-time or an hour at the latest. "I don't know if it's directly related to our physical condition, but we had a lot of players who took part in the World Cup," he said.
It was a jarring way to begin life at the Etihad for Maresca, who was confirmed as Pep Guardiola's successor on June 29 on a three-year contract, arriving after a mid-season departure from Chelsea. He had already built a strong managerial résumé before the move — guiding Leicester City to the Championship title in 2023-24, then leading Chelsea to a fourth-place Premier League finish, the Conference League and the FIFA Club World Cup.
None of that softened Sunday's blow, but Maresca was careful not to let the result define his outlook so early in the job. "It's just the beginning, we have many things that we need to do better," he said. City now turn to the Premier League opener, where the real rebuilding project begins in earnest.
