This week’s soccer questions: were we wrong about Man City and does the Ballon d’Or ignore Americans?

We look at Enzo Maresca’s takeover in Guardiola’s shadow, shifting dynamics in women’s soccer and Raphinha’s incredible form at Barcelona

Squint hard enough and Manchester City still look like Manchester City. They’re still playing the same possession-hungry soccer. Erling Haaland is still scoring goals. They even have a new manager with vaguely the same appearance and oeuvre as their old manager. An AI Pep Guardiola in the dugout.

Of course, nothing is truly the same at City this season. How could it be? This is a club that was moulded in the image of Guardiola over a full decade. Everything was geared towards the Catalan coach whose manic intensity energized everything at the Etihad Stadium. Take that energy away and many assumed the lights would turn off.

So far, though, Enzo Maresca’s Manchester City have played some bright soccer, winning their first three Premier League matches of the season and starting their Champions League campaign with a comfortable 2-0 away win over Porto on Tuesday. If a post-Pep drop-off is coming, it hasn’t hit City yet.

This isn’t to say there hasn’t been vulnerability. Maresca is still integrating a number of summer signings. It will take time for Elliot Anderson, Ayyoub Bouaddi and Enzo Fernández to settle into City’s reshaped midfield unit. As if life after Guardiola wasn’t stark enough, Manchester City are also attempting to move on from Rodri, the central pillar who supported so much within their team.

The scale of turnover at the Etihad this summer was huge. Bernardo Silva and John Stones departed, too. Eleven senior squad members in total left, and yet Manchester City have already shown enough to suggest they will once again compete for the biggest prizes this season. Predictions of their demise may have been premature.

Thirty candidates for the 2026 Ballon d’Or Féminin and just one American – Rose Lavelle. Nobody expected to see any star-spangled representation on the men’s shortlist (as good as Malik Tillman was at the World Cup), but the sight of just one American name on the shortlist for the women’s award was jarring considering the country’s standing as a women’s soccer superpower.

Americans have been overlooked for the most prestigious individual prize in soccer before. Last year, Emily Fox was the highest-ranking US player in the final voting, finishing 25th. Lindsey Heaps (26th) was the only other American in the top 30. The year before that, when the US women’s national team won gold at the Paris Olympics, there wasn’t an American in the top three.

None of this is to say Americans should be rewarded by right. The women’s soccer landscape has shifted dramatically in recent times with many of the sport’s best players now operating in Europe. Long gone are the days when the NWSL (and the various iterations before it) sat unchallenged at the top of the women’s soccer food chain.

This shifting power dynamic could be a factor in why the Ballon d’Or Féminin has a habit of overlooking Americans. This is, after all, a European award.