Jack Grealish is prowling. The wind tousling his hair, the ball at his feet, the way it was always meant to be. In front of him a wall of Bournemouth defenders jumpily stands guard, eyes wide like stags ready to bolt. Grealish shuffles inside, body feinting, hips dancing. You want to know what happens next. What happens next is that the referee blows for full time.
It’s the 97th minute; Grealish came on in the 91st. In that time Bournemouth somehow managed to score a goal. It wasn’t Grealish’s fault, but it did eat up most of the time in which he was hoping to make an impression. No matter. As the game ends, the cameras hunt down a treble-winning City legend making what might well be his final appearance at the Etihad Stadium. Kevin De Bruyne takes his handshakes and his tributes. Grealish slips quietly down the tunnel.
Still, even this brief uncredited cameo represents progress of sorts. In City’s previous three games Grealish did not even make it off the bench. In last weekend’s FA Cup final, with City chasing an equaliser, he watched as Pep Guardiola brought on a 19-year-old debutant in Claudio Echeverri instead of him. Opponents against whom Grealish has played 90 minutes in 2025: Salford, Leyton Orient, Plymouth, Leicester. Over the league season as a whole Grealish has played just 22% of City’s minutes.
After the Bournemouth game on Tuesday night Grealish will have heard that Guardiola would rather quit City than be forced to carry on leaving players “in the freezer”, frozen out of the matchday squad. On Grealish he declared: “He has to come back to play minutes to start to play again.” Want to play minutes, Jack? It’s simple! Just play more minutes!
Of course it is just possible Grealish may be able to read between the lines here. And in a way, the separation process has been taking place over years rather than weeks. Signed in the summer of 2021 for a British record £100m – and still the seventh most expensive footballer of all time – Grealish feels in retrospect increasingly like a short-term solution to a short-term need, a player signed for a team and perhaps even a game that no longer really exists.
And of course the first thing that needs to be said at this point is, you know, fair enough. £100m should be buying you a generation-defining player: instead, apart from one superb season in the 2022-23 treble-winning side, Grealish never really came close to justifying the faith invested in him. A record of 12 goals and 12 assists in four Premier League seasons speaks for itself. As Guardiola put it earlier this season: “In the end, it is about performance, delivering assists and goals.”
Even so, it’s instructive to go back to Grealish’s first season at City, a season in which Grealish openly fretted about his lack of hard numbers and was slapped down in public by his manager for doing so. “Always we talk about statistics,” Guardiola scolded. “Players today play for the statistics but this is the biggest mistake they can do. We didn’t buy him to score 45 goals. He has other qualities.”
But of course the City team of 2021-22 was flush with goals from all areas: from Riyad Mahrez and Raheem Sterling, Phil Foden and De Bruyne, and Gabriel Jesus and Bernardo Silva. The following season a 52-goal striker would be signed in Erling Haaland. What Guardiola demanded from Grealish was control. Control of the ball, control of tempo, progression up the pitch, acceleration, deceleration.
These days, with Haaland ailing and City scrapping to reach next season’s Champions League, the demands are different. Even compared with two years ago the Premier League is more dynamic, more vertical, this City less able to dominate territory than their predecessors. Whatever happens against Fulham on Sunday, City will end this season with their lowest average possession since the Manuel Pellegrini era. In this shifting landscape the capacity for a struggling side to carry a winger with no straight-line pace and no goal threat is gently receding.
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So if Guardiola subtly moved the goalposts on Grealish, perhaps it is because the goalposts also subtly moved on Guardiola. The ability to retain possession in dangerous areas has become less important than the ability to use it quickly, which is why players such as Jérémy Doku and Savinho have found themselves preferred this season. The signing of Omar Marmoush in January, a forward who operates in very similar spaces to Grealish, is another reminder of the rapidly changing nature of the job: one defined by speed, directness, thrumming momentum and getting shots off.
Naturally there will be the usual mutterings about Grealish’s lifestyle, but while this is a player who could probably do with getting photographed in the pub a little less, there is little evidence on the pitch to suggest that he has neglected himself, or let his physical standards drop. Rather, the tale of Grealish is a parable of how extreme wealth inequality allows the biggest clubs not just to accumulate talent but to mould it: to change its nature, to render it more immediately useful but also a little more boring, to narrow its horizons.
On joining City, Grealish was forced to adjust his game radically: to focus more on recycling possession, winning fouls, eking out yards rather than unleashing the tricks and flourishes that made him so beloved at Aston Villa. These were the compromises necessary to take Grealish from the Championship to the top step of the Champions League, and he was handsomely rewarded for it too. But there is a certain irony in the fact that the Grealish of Villa between 2019 and 2021 would probably be the perfect player for City now, and yet the Grealish of City now is very much not.
So despite signing Grealish for £100m there is no real pressure on City to make this signing work. Take the hit, sell him to Newcastle or Tottenham, move on without regrets. Grealish is 29 now. He has given City his peak years. And he will be bleakly aware, in more ways than one, that he never had quite as much time as he thought he did.
