Kyle Walker transfer: Man City defender is one of Pep Guardiola’s most trusted players – but time catches up with everyone | Football News

By the end of his first season in charge, Pep Guardiola had realised that it would take a massive overhaul of the Manchester City squad to win the trophies he’d been brought in to deliver.

Ten regular first team players were shown the exit door in the summer of 2017 and a raft of new talent was brought in to pave the way for an era of domestic dominance.

Central to that was the signing of Kyle Walker, who at the time was the most expensive defender in English football history, arriving from Tottenham for a fee worth more than £50m including add-ons.

Guardiola needed more energy from his full-backs to realise his vision, and Walker was seen to be the perfect upgrade on fan-favourite Pablo Zabaleta, who was released at the age of 32.

Eyebrows were raised at the time, but in the seven-and-a-half years since, Walker has repaid that transfer fee many times over.

In his first season at the Etihad, the right-back helped transform an ailing defence to become Premier League champions with a record-breaking points tally. Over the years that followed Walker became a mainstay of a City side that dominated domestically, and in 2023 finally got their hands on the holy grail that is the Champions League trophy, for the first time.

Subsequently Walker stepped up to captain the team to yet another Premier League title last season, as well as becoming world champions in another club first.

There’s no doubt about how much he has developed as a player at City, becoming one of Guardiola’s most-trusted defenders and on his day proving himself to be the best in the world defending one-on-one.

Rather than fear coming up against Kylian Mbappe or Vinicius Junior, the joke among the City squad is that Walker carries them around in his pocket and they actually run scared of him. The England defender is so confident he’s got the measure of the world’s best, he named his podcast along those lines.

During his decade in charge, Guardiola has evolved his system to prefer his full-backs to invert and join central midfield, and Walker has had to evolve too. While he adapted his game to be able to step inside from a flat back four when Joao Cancelo was the more offensive option on the opposite side, Walker is not suited to the current system.

In April 2023 Guardiola told us honestly in a press conference that Walker “cannot do it”. As a result he was not selected for the Champions League final, a game where Guardiola decided possession would be decisive, despite Walker completely nullifying Real Madrid’s wide attacking threat over two legs of the semi-final.

However, the ultimate career disappointment is also the occasion where Walker’s leadership qualities showed themselves at their strongest.

Having been told he wasn’t going to start the biggest match of his club career, Walker took it upon himself to deliver a heart-felt pre-match speech in the dressing room where he told his team-mates his dream was in their hands.

It worked, and he will always have the Champions League medal to prove it. He did start in the final of the FIFA Club World Cup six months later.

But as with Zabaleta in 2017, time eventually catches up with everybody. This season Walker has made too many mistakes and has looked a shadow of the player that toyed with Mbappe in those fascinating showdowns.

There are not many Premier League footballers who make headlines on both the front and back pages of the papers, and this season Walker’s name has appeared more in celebrity gossip columns than in Manchester City match reports.

Rico Lewis has been preferred at right-back for the club, and has now also joined his more senior team-mate in the England squad, to add further competition there.

Walker has been an incredible servant to his country, playing in two losing European Championship finals among his 93 England caps, and the ambition burns brightly for him to reach his century. He hopes by staying relevant in a top European league he can achieve that career goal.

Even so, it’s an unusual situation for a club captain to seek a January move, especially after winning so much.

Whatever Walker’s motivation for wanting to seek out a new challenge overseas, it will bring the curtain down on an incredible era of success on the blue side of Manchester and in the Premier League.