Manchester City made Jack Grealish (26) the first English footballer to cost more than 100 million euros last summer. Coach Pep Guardiola’s team transferred 117.5 million euros to Aston Villa for the Birmingham club’s homegrown team, which has never won a professional title.
“Pressure is a big thing in football, especially for me who came here with this price tag – and because I’m English,” Grealish said in an interview with the “Daily Mail“. Man City bought the Euro 2020 fan favorite in their own country and made him the most expensive Englishman ever. Three of the six most expensive transfers of English players took place last summer.
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Despite only having seven goals in 32 games and a back-and-forth between the starting XI and the bench, the winger is satisfied with his first season away from Aston Villa: “It’s no secret that I would have liked to have scored and prepared more, but I think I have played well”.
His weakest yield since 2015/16, when Grealish was still acting as Jokaer, is also due to the change associated with the transfer. Birmingham and Manchester are only separated by about 140 kilometers of motorway, but a lot was new for him: “When I arrived here, it was different from Villa or the national team – you have the same culture there, you have the same nationality because most of the boys are English. And here it’s only four or five of us who are English.”
Man City: Grealish wants to win the Champions League
The biggest goal this season seems to be the Champions League – ahead of the English championship. “Most of the guys here have won everything, several times in fact, so I think it’s the ‘premier class’ that everyone wants this year. (…) We haven’t won that yet, so we’re keeping our eyes on it.” The “Citizens” can still win the treble of championship, Champions League and FA Cup. In the league it’s a neck-and-neck race with Liverpool, which you also meet in the cup – in the “premier class” there’s no reunion with Jürgen Klopp’s Reds until the final at the earliest.
Expectations are high for football’s most valuable squad and Grealish takes the advice of his former youth coach Steve Burns: “Pressure is a privilege.”
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