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Manchester City Football Club dominated both the Premier League and the whole Europe in 2022-23.
The blues won the league, the FA Cup, and the UEFA Champions League en route to completing a historic treble.
But it didn’t always look that promising. In fact, for the first half of the season Man City found itself looking up at a surprising leader of the Premier League table: Arsenal.
The Gunner haven’t won the league since 2004. But under manager Mikel Arteta, and armed with a slew of young talent, Arsenal look here to stay for the foreseeable future.
One of the players that led the Gunners to their hot start was Brazilian forward Gabriel Jesus. Jesus finished the season with 11 goals and six assists in 26 league matches and was red hot in the early season.
Jesus joined Arsenal last summer after spending six seasons with Manchester City. While he would’ve served as the backup with Norwegian superstar Erling Haaland had he stayed in Manchester, it was something else that Jesus says drove him away.
“There was a Champions League game, PSG, at home, in which he put (Oleksandr) Zinchenko as a false 9. Crazy thing,” Jesus said on the The Denilson Show podcast. “The day before, he didn’t even use (Zinchenko) in training, he had put me in as a striker…Zinchenko even joked with me: ‘that day I felt bad for you.’
“Two hours before the game, there’s a team talk, the team eats, rests for 30 minutes and goes to the game. He told us the team, I didn’t even eat. I went straight to the room, crying, I called my mother to talk: ‘I want to leave.’ I’m going home, because he put [Zinchenko] on, and he didn’t put me on. He put a left-back there. I went crazy.”
Jesus later replaced Zinchenko in the second half and set up the equalizing goal before scoring a late winner to give City a 2-1 win.
“There was a lot of that with him [Guardiola], and it’s not easy. But one [player] evolves. It is really hard. That’s when I decided, I didn’t want to stay anymore. And I decided to leave.”
Certainly Guardiola and City were okay without Jesus this past season. But it also appears the forward has no regrets about moving on.