We have been staring at Phil Foden for close to a decade – how well do we actually know him?

Phil Foden says he is excited about working under Enzo Maresca, his new manager at Manchester City. We should call this exactly what it is: a very obvious barefaced lie. No doubt Foden is excited about playing football again, about challenging for trophies with his boyhood club, the new Premier League season, his new contract, a fresh start, etc, etc.

But let’s be real. Holidays are something you get excited about. Birthdays. Weddings. Amazon deliveries. The new Charli xcx album. Christmas. Playing for Enzo Maresca inspires plenty of emotions, but excitement would probably feature pretty low down a list. At best, you brace for Maresca. You steel yourself. You look in the mirror every morning and ask yourself whether you’re man enough for him. But if you’re excited, then he simply isn’t doing his job.

Hours of classroom work and painstaking video analysis. Relentless discipline on the training pitch as he drills his blueprint into your nervous system. Blunt feedback. Homework assignments to complete on international duty. My favourite bit of Maresca fastidiousness is that when his teams score a goal, the captain is banned from participating in the celebration and must instead come to the touchline to receive further tactical instruction.

For all the churn and upheaval in east Manchester this summer, perhaps the most intriguing plotline of the nascent Maresca dynasty is something that hasn’t really changed at all. Under Pep Guardiola, Foden won everything there is to win in club football. He’s been earmarked as a generational talent since he was a child, played for England in three international tournaments, embedded himself in one of the greatest club teams ever seen. He’s now 26 years old. On some level, we have been staring at Phil Foden for close to a decade. How well do we know him?

To take one example: it’s the year 2026, and nobody really knows what his best position is. Is he a forward or an attacking midfielder? Is he at his best central, or wide, or wide coming central? Deep, on the last line, between the lines? Come to think of it, what is it he does again? Good passer, but not really a pure creator. Good feet, but not really a pure dribbler. Scores goals, but not an elite goalscorer (with the exception of 2023-24, when he inexplicably started walloping in 25-yard screamers). Arguably not top 10 in the world in any single facet of the game. Yet still incontrovertibly very good, for reasons that have long been internalised but which still feel hard to articulate. How, after 49 international caps and 225 games in the most scrutinised league in the world, is this even possible?

In nine seasons as his manager, Guardiola provided all the answers, albeit not always in an intelligible order. “Winger suits him better,” he said in 2022, predicting he would eventually move to the centre. By 2023, he was warning Foden that he was too much of a “free instinct” to be trusted with a central role.

Two years later, he said Foden’s best position was as a No 10, “a little bit free and close to the box”. Occasionally, he was used as a false 9. Last season, he was deployed in a deeper midfield role. (“Not a player to control the game,” Guardiola would say just before he left.)

So over the years Foden would become a kind of footballing Calpol: a plug-in solution versatile enough to be deployed for pretty much any purpose. Does this explain the sharp decline? In 2024, he was the Premier League player of the year. By the 2025-26 run-in he was essentially a passenger: unused against Real Madrid, a 90th-minute pity substitute in the Carabao Cup final against Arsenal. Two days before England’s epochal game at the Azteca Stadium, Foden was at Wimbledon watching Iga Swiatek in the third round. What happened? How does he recapture the best version of himself? And – more pointedly – what if we’ve already seen it?

These are questions with implications that go well beyond City and Maresca. For English football, which has spent decades trying to unlock the secret of industrial talent development, to work out how players grow and why they flourish, Foden is Patient Zero. Take a preternatural teenage talent, hand-picked from a cast of millions. Furnish him with the best facilities, the best footballing education, that money can buy. Surround him with champion players and one of the best coaches in history, at a club where there is stability and a process and he can mature at his own gradual rate: neither thrown in too early, nor held back too long, nor pounded into the ground. If you were trying to engineer an elite football career from the ground up, Foden is how you would do it.

If it turns out he peaked at 24, what does that say about the system that created him? If your generational talent ultimately can’t beat Noni Madueke and Ivan Toney to a place in the World Cup squad, whose fault is that? Foden? The media hype machine? The coach who developed him, nurtured him, showed him the road to greatness, but also played him in about eight different positions and never quite allowed him to forge his own identity as a footballer?

Obviously it’s not really Pep’s fault. But Foden is perhaps unique among Guardiola’s prodigies in that he was there right from the very start of the journey. This actually happens a lot less than you think. Lionel Messi was already 21 when Guardiola took over at Barcelona and basically destined to be brilliant. Pretty much all his greatest players were refined and improved rather than nurtured wholesale from childhood. And so Foden is a kind of player English football has never really produced in its history: a street talent adapted over years, by painstaking degrees, into an incredibly complex but essentially bespoke player, a single solution for a single team.

Foden is 26 and still largely devoid of context. We don’t know how he’d play in a struggling team. We don’t know what would happen if he had the keys to dictate a game. We don’t know what happens when you give him responsibility. We don’t even know much about his tactical intelligence, because he’s played his entire career under a guy telling him exactly where and when to run. Perhaps this explains the wild discrepancy between City Foden (17 major trophies) and England Foden (a goal on average every 18 months).

Now, under a new manager, with a new midfield, Foden faces – remarkably – a make-or-break season. Bernardo Silva has gone. Rodri may well follow. Rayan Cherki is probably ahead of him in the pecking order. In a Premier League increasingly built around lightning pace and brute physicality, where does Foden fit into the new vision? What happens if he endures a third disappointing season in succession?

But there are opportunities here too. City’s World Cup players are only just returning and there should be time for him to stake a claim. A more vertical, high-energy style may just suit him. For all his kooky control-freakery, a new manager like Maresca will never be able to exert the same stranglehold as the man he replaced. For better or worse, this may just be the season when we finally find out who Phil Foden is.

Reporting from The Guardian contributed to this story.