Manchester City set valuations for certain transfer targets that they will not move beyond, a club lazily painted as having bottomless funds instead pulling the plug on any deal that they think is spending more than they should.
That appears to be the case with Marc Cucurella. Just as happened with Jorginho and Napoli in 2018, City have been in a queue of one to sign a player and yet their public refusal to meet the asking price of the selling club has alerted Chelsea to swoop in and beat them to a player with a higher offer.
Should Cucurella complete a move to Stamford Bridge, there will be shrugs inside the Etihad and a reminder of the transfer policy led by Txiki Begiristain. City would rather miss out on signing players than go against a fundamental pillar of their strategy.
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There are several examples of the club defying expectations with this that back up a stance that can be unpopular with fans eager to see reinforcements; City won the league with 98 points despite not signing Jorginho or another central midfielder in 2018, while missing out on Fred and Alexis Sanchez to United has come to be seen as bullets dodged as those players have failed to justify their fees. Despite bombing out the only left-back signed since 2017 after six months, Pep Guardiola has ingeniously managed to fill that void by using three players out of position there.
Another name thrown about when citing lucky misses is Harry Maguire. City wanted to sign the centre-back in 2019 to replace Vincent Kompany but would only go to £70m where Leicester wanted £80m and United stepped in to sign him instead, paying a world-record fee for a defender.
It is easy to see the slump that Maguire is in for United - he was loudly booed recently by thousands of fans in a friendly and faces calls to lose the captaincy as a result of his poor form - and conclude that it would have been a costly mistake for the Blues to stump up the extra £10m they wouldn't. A counter-argument would be that Guardiola has improved virtually every player in his squad whereas there have been no success stories in the chaos at Old Trafford and Maguire has looked solid in an (admittedly more defensive) England team.
Even if you do not think Maguire would have been a success at City, that does not change the fact that the failure to land a centre-back in that transfer window was a major factor in them failing to win the league title for the only time in the last five years. It was blindingly obvious in pre-season that Guardiola's side lacked the defensive cohesion and as soon as Aymeric Laporte suffered a long-term injury there was so little trust in the remaining options that the manager played Fernandinho there for the majority of the campaign.
However good Liverpool were that season, they did not have to work hard at Anfield to get in behind a makeshift pair of the out-of-position Fernandinho and the soon-to-be-gone Angelino and the problem persisted into the following season when City conceded five at home to Leicester in their first home game. Only then was the move made to bring in Ruben Dias, who immediately and remarkably transformed the team.
Time will tell if City have made the right decision not to pay over the top for Cucurella, but Maguire shows that judging their past escapes depends on whether or not the existing players in the squad can step up. Unless they sign a different left-back or Guardiola makes another inspired conversion, that will leave (right-back) Joao Cancelo and teenager Josh Wilson-Esbrand to justify their call over the course of this season.
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