Enzo Maresca has the best opening run any Premier League manager has ever had. It's also one of the least convincing records the league has ever handed out.
Maresca won his first seven league games in charge of Manchester City, sealed with a 3-2 win over Ipswich on October 17. No manager had done that before. The old mark of six was shared by Pep Guardiola, Carlo Ancelotti and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, good company, and City matched their own best start to a season from 1897/98. As of this writing they sit top with a perfect record.
Now the asterisks, and there are several.
Start with the obvious one. Maresca inherited this squad rather than built it. He left Chelsea this summer to replace Guardiola at the richest, deepest operation in English football. Handing that group to a competent coach and watching it win games is just the job working as designed.
Then the calls. On opening day City needed a stoppage-time Gvardiol goal to scrape past Bournemouth, after Guehi had hauled them level, in a game that left plenty of people thinking City had gotten lucky. In the derby at Old Trafford, Erling Haaland's winner was first ruled out for offside and then awarded on review. Howard Webb's own refereeing body later said the goal should have stayed ruled out because Enzo Fernandez was interfering from an offside position, and Pro Ref contacted United to concede the error. City won that one 1-0, having spent over an hour with ten men after Phil Foden's red card, so there's real credit in the result too. But the goal that won it was wrong, and the people who award the goals have said so.
Maresca's response was to dredge up 2023. "We are still waiting for the apology for that goal," he said, pointing at a call that went against him three years earlier. A manager handed a goal the officials admit he shouldn't have had, demanding apologies for ancient history. Bold.
Against Liverpool, Ryan Gravenberch's sending-off drew furious criticism from Andoni Iraola and former officials who thought it harsh. Nobody's formally admitted an error on that one. But the run of decisions Liverpool's people are angry about isn't easy for City fans to wave off when one of the others has already been conceded in writing.
And all of this is happening while Manchester City sit found guilty of 114 of the 115 financial charges the Premier League brought against them. The verdict's in, but the punishment hasn't been decided yet. An appeal is coming. Any record set during this window carries a question nobody at the club wants asked: how much of the machine that produced it was built inside the rules?
City fans will throw this back, and they're right to. The points are in the table. Nobody rescinds a result because a pundit didn't like a yellow card. Until a sanction is actually applied, seven wins are seven wins, and the record is Maresca's to keep.
So keep it. His name goes in the books and stays there. But strip out the squad he inherited, the goal the officials took back, and the guilty verdict humming in the background, and there isn't much of Maresca left in Maresca's record. He walked into the best job in the league and let it carry him.
