Let's get one thing straight: no, Manchester City are not trying to sign Declan Rice just to stop a title rival getting him. In a world of increasingly preposterous footballing opinions, that one is right up there.
It was only a couple of months ago that City were being criticised for strengthening Arsenal by selling them Gabriel Jesus and Oleksandr Zinchenko last summer, so the idea they would now spend £100million on Rice in an attempt to prevent Arsenal running them even closer next season does not stand up to any scrutiny.
City also have the smallest squad by numbers in the league and that is by design — Pep Guardiola does not want to have too many top players left on the bench wanting game time. They would not sign a £100million player frivolously.
And, believe it or not, there is actually a plan at City for how Rice would fit into Guardiola's team.
In fairness, that might be tough to understand on the face of it.
Rice is a holding midfielder, and City not only already have one of those in Rodri but they consider him to be the best in the world at it. But they see Rice, and fellow midfielder Mateo Kovacic, who has now signed from Chelsea, as multifunctional players who could several positions for them — the type who have become so important to the team in recent years.
Bernardo Silva, Phil Foden, Kevin De Bruyne, Jack Grealish, Julian Alvarez, Nathan Ake, Manuel Akanji and John Stones are all players already on the books who can fulfil different roles. City also want to sign RB Leipzig defender Josko Gvardiol (he has agreed personal terms), who can play in at least two positions as well: centre-back and left-back.
Rice is being pursued to replace Ilkay Gundogan, which shows City do not simply see him as just a holding midfielder. Sure, if Rodri needs a rest, they could use him in that role, but they believe he can play anywhere in midfield, as Gundogan did. Perhaps not quite so seamlessly at first, but there is certainly the potential to do it. It is the same with Kovacic.
Kovacic and Rice like to run with the ball more than Gundogan, who was more about short passes, and Rice in particular can play direct passes between the lines. Neither of them is as complete a player as Gundogan, either, but if both are at the Etihad Stadium next season they will be asked to adapt and, in a way, City would adapt to them.
Gundogan would nearly always be on the team sheet over his seven seasons at City and you knew roughly which area of the pitch he would operate in but you could never be sure what he had actually been asked to do that day. He could drop back next to Rodri and then move up the pitch, or if Stones was next to Rodri, the German could stay higher. He could move out to the left or he could make runs into the box.
City feel they have the world's best defensive midfielder in Rodri but want Rice to play a different role (Photo: Nick Potts/PA Images via Getty Images)
He could do it all but he did not have to do it all at once, and that shows us that while Kovacic and Rice will/would have to add elements to their game as City players, they will not have to do everything at once, either.
Gundogan, Bernardo and Grealish did not arrive as the complete players they are now, and while it may take the usual season before any new arrivals look their best, there is a lot of precedent for such adaptations.
Given the importance of their midfielders to City's game, quite how the entire team would look during that adaptation process is a bit of a mystery.
The big question heading into next season is the motivation levels of the players — because they have won all there is to win, will they have the hunger to go again? That is the first thing that Guardiola needs to sort out. But there will be another big topic to keep an eye on: how will City go about controlling matches with midfielders who are more box-to-box than “control”?
The story of their 2022-23 season was them finding the right balance in the team, considering summer signing Erling Haaland is such a destructive force, but one who cannot play as a false nine anything like as well as those who had done it for City across the previous two years.
It is why Guardiola picked Grealish and Riyad Mahrez (and then Bernardo) on the wings, in addition to Gundogan and Rodri in midfield. They are players who take lots of touches, know when to slow the game down and appreciate the “pausa” quality that the City manager has always cherished. It was not a perfect solution by any means but it helped City ensure they were organised while they tried to work out how to play with Haaland up front.
In very broad layman's terms, everybody else on the pitch combined to ensure the team stayed compact and patient so that De Bruyne and Haaland could run amok — at the right time.
Guardiola only ever played Foden or Alvarez in an attacking midfield role if it was instead of De Bruyne. He never played them together because that would have affected the balance of the midfield and therefore the entire team — without somebody like Gundogan or Bernardo to offset their attacking instincts, City could have attacked too quickly, leaving spaces between their lines and being more susceptible to counter-attacks.
So how will it work now there isn't going to be a Gundogan-style player in the engine room? That was one of the mysteries about City's pursuit of Jude Bellingham, another box-to-box player who has ended up at Real Madrid.
Well, how last season panned out does offer some clues.
Things started to click into place once Guardiola began using defender Stones in midfield, which created an extra man next to Rodri while allowing a midfielder (usually Gundogan) to stay higher, helping City to create overloads both deeper in midfield and in more advanced areas. That allowed Gundogan to play different roles and lessened the reliance on his “control” abilities.
Kovacic and Rice may not be up to Gundogan's standard in those terms, but they are more suited to doing it than Foden and Alvarez, who are also going through the process of adjusting their approaches.
And City got extra control from Grealish and Mahrez/Bernardo on the wings because they helped to dictate the tempo of matches as they like the ball to feet and to take lots of touches. It explains why Guardiola has moved on from wingers such as Raheem Sterling and Leroy Sane, who liked to burst forward into space.
Guardiola plans to stick to the four centre-backs approach next season, rather than signing traditional full-backs, and that will often mean Stones going into midfield again. It also means City have a solid setup at the back, meaning that if there is a relative lack of control (as there was at times last season while they adapted to Haaland) they are at least well equipped to deal with counter-attacks.
Ultimately, they do not have to rely quite so much on one player — Gundogan, or David Silva before him — to dictate the tempo.
In time, Kovacic and Rice, if he does sign, will have a better appreciation of how to control matches and of how to operate in different areas of the pitch — to be more careful with the ball in deeper areas, to take more risks in the final third — but they will also be able to play to their strengths, and City believe they can contribute goals like Gundogan did.
While they learn, the team is well set up to provide a strong support network. After all, City did not have as much control over matches last season compared to previous years because they had Haaland as a traditional striker rather than playing with a false nine but his threat on the break and the defenders' ability to defend “properly”, as Guardiola puts it, meant they thrived in the relative uncertainty and won the treble.
It might not always look like a well-oiled machine in the coming months, but then it didn't for much of last season, either.
No matter how this pans out, it is clear more thought has gone into this bid than simply City trying to keep Rice out of Mikel Arteta's clutches.
And Arsenal might still sign him, anyway.
(Top photo: Jacques Feeney/Offside/Offside via Getty Images)