Pep Guardiola has been here twice before with Man City - with wildly different endings

Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola is in the dark over what impact Gianluigi Donnarumma will have on his team

Ruben Dias impressed on debut and quickly made a huge difference at Manchester City

The blessing and the curse of Pep Guardiola staying so long at Manchester City is that there are so many reference points. It's great to be able to think back to similar situations, but there are so many that things can quickly change.

For example, last season came to resemble bits of the 2016/17 and the 2019/20 campaigns. They are obvious starting points because they are the only other years Guardiola didn't win the league at the Etihad, but the performances had both the end-of-an-era feeling of the manager's first year in Manchester and the problems in the boxes without a strong defence that they had without Vincent Kompany and the injured Aymeric Laporte.

Following on from that, this summer was billed as in line with the summer of 2017 when City had the mother of all transfer windows and spent a fortune that would bring them greater riches for nearly a decade. Bernardo Silva, Kyle Walker and Ederson were the standout buys that instantly improved the first XI and made themselves integral parts of teams that would win multiple titles.

The churn has been similar this summer and Tijjani Reijnders, Rayan Ait-Nouri, Rayan Cherki and James Trafford have already given the team a very different feel. Add in Oscar Bobb and Rodri, who both missed last season with injury, and January arrivals Omar Marmoush, Nico Gonzalez and Abdukodir Khusanov and the changes are stark.

Already after three games though, City appear to be in the same position as they were at two different points of Guardiola's history with the club. Not only that, they had two very different endings.

The first that springs to mind is September 2016. Guardiola has taken the wild step of replacing one of the club's best players in Joe Hart and replacing him with Claudio Bravo from Barcelona.

Bravo's first game was the Manchester derby and his performance was wild and erratic in an otherwise controlled display from City. It sets the tone for a bizarre time for the City No.1 where he ended up seemingly incapable of stopping any goals and he was replaced inside a year by Ederson.

The other scenario is October 2020, when City are trying to win the title back but look a shadow of the team that got 198 points across two seasons. They are all over the place defensively, as evidenced by a 5-2 humbling at home to Leicester.

Then Ruben Dias is signed, and unfathomably manages to transform the entire defence immediately. Dias plays virtually every game, City become one of the meanest defences on the continent and, as well as winning the league, they also make the Champions League final.

Which path will Gianluigi Donnarumma take then as he steps into what feels like familiar territory. Can he be the Dias figure that instantly brings organisation and leadership to a back four that has looked in disarray for too long?

Will he be the Bravo figure, picked as the player the manager puts his reputation on but looking sadly like a round peg for a square hole?

Or can he be something different entirely, either taking us to another Guardiola memory or bringing something new to a team that badly wants to look to the future?

Having been brought in to replace Ederson, what happens next with Donnarumma is likely to shape the story of City's whole season.

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