Manchester City’s Liverpool recruit is already having a huge impact says Ilkay Gundogan

Ilkay Gundogan has revealed that one of Manchester City’s coaching staff recruits secured from Liverpool this summer is already having a big impact on the squad.

Pep Guardiola and Manchester City officials took the decision to heavily rearrange their backroom staff set-up off the back of a difficult last campaign, allowing for three departures from the club.

Upon the expiry of their respective contracts, assistant manager Juanma Lillo and technical coach Inigo Dominguez would both leave, followed by Carlos Vicens – who held responsibilities as a set-piece coach but opted to take on the head coach role at SC Braga in Portugal.

Moving swiftly to recruit new ideas and faces in the available roles, Manchester City confirmed Jurgen Klopp’s long-standing assistant at Liverpool, Pepijn Lijnders as Guardiola’s new right-hand man, with Kolo Toure promoted from the Under-18 set-up at the City Football Academy.

Elsewhere and City also moved with intent to secure long-standing opposition analyst at Liverpool, James French into the role of set-piece coach – ending his spell working under Brendan Rodgers, Jurgen Klopp, and most recently, Arne Slot.

And speaking after Manchester City’s 6-0 win over Al Ain in Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium on Sunday night, Ilkay Gundogan was keen to speak on the impact of the club’s new range of coaching staff members this summer, and particularly their new set-piece coach.

“The new people that have come in, especially our new set-piece coach [James French], explain things in a very simple way that I quite like and I know other players also like very much,” Gundogan explained.

“We just try to get the patterns, connections between players,” he continued. “That’s not just set-pieces, that’s also for tactics, the way we play – one of the most important things – creating connections between players, anticipating timings, get to know each other as good as possible.

“Only if we’re connected as good as we can be, we can play amazing football, and we’ve done that in the past. It’s about winning that back and I think we’ve started really good in the competition, and now it’s about doing it in every single game better and better.”

City will return to action on Thursday night when they take on Juventus on matchday three of the group stage, knowing that only victory will be enough to secure top spot in the group after they missed out on an extra goal against Al Ain that would have permitted a draw.