Jack Grealish rolled out of bed, sat up and gazed out to the garden below, a scene designed to capture the alluring existence of a £100million footballer at the peak of his powers.
“Secret?” he asked. “There is no secret. I’m pretty chilled, laid-back, down-to-earth. But laid-back doesn’t mean I’m not driven. We all have our ‘why’.”
It was an advert launched earlier in the season by a sports-science nutrition company that had chosen Manchester City’s record signing as their new global brand ambassador.
The format is well-trodden: here’s a famous athlete at home; here he is on a treadmill; here he is lifting dumbbells; here is on on the training pitch, dripping with sweat; now he’s shovelling spoonfuls of the product into a flask, shaking it and cautiously taking a swig.
“I prep, I push hard and I recover,” he says, shaking another flask later on, adding that he gives football “everything that I’ve got. Everything”.
On it goes. He mentions being seen as “the guy that’s always up for a laugh”. “That doesn’t mean I’m not serious,” he says, but he wants to do it “with a smile on my face — or what’s the point?”
On one level, it’s cliched nonsense. On another, it’s fascinating because it seems, perhaps more than intended, to capture the Grealish paradox: “chilled, laid-back, down-to-earth”, “always up for a laugh” and “a smile on my face” in a sport — in an era and under an insatiably demanding coach — that requires him to be a deadly serious athlete, as relentless, driven and intense as he claims to be.
Is Grealish giving it everything he has got? It’s the type of question that has dogged him at regular intervals throughout his career. At the end of the 2022-23 season, as an established part of a City team that had won the treble of Premier League, FA Cup and Champions League, he felt he had found the definitive answer.
But his form since then has been beyond disappointing. He has gone 35 appearances in all competitions without scoring for City, a run stretching back more than 12 months. His previous hot streak, a run of three goals in four matches in December 2023, followed a drought stretching back to the previous April.
Since the start of last season, he has registered just three goals and five assists in 53 appearances for City. Goals and assists have never been his calling cards, but those numbers are meagre for a frontline player in a team which (until the past couple of months) has been dominant over that period. Nor can it be dismissed as a symptom of City’s recent malaise: Grealish’s struggles pre-dated that by far.
Grealish had a wonderful 2023 with Manchester City… but has struggled since (Lars Baron – FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)
In some ways, the most worrying numbers concern his playing time. Since the start of 2024, he has started just nine out of City’s 39 Premier League matches. Injuries have been a factor, but he has been named as a substitute on another 21 occasions and it is striking that those 21 matches have yielded just 185 minutes of playing time from the bench. Only once, during a stalemate at home to Arsenal last March, was he introduced before the 70th minute.
Last weekend, Guardiola made his frustrations public. Why was he picking Savinho, the 20-year-old Brazilian winger, ahead of the £100m man? Because, the City manager told reporters after the 4-1 victory over West Ham United, Savinho “is in better shape and everything than Jack”.
Invited to elaborate, Guardiola said, “It’s not about what they have done.” He said Grealish had to reach the required standard “every single training session, every single game”.
The unmistakable inference was that Grealish has been coasting, resting on his talent, as if content to live off past glories — the opposite of giving it “everything I’ve got”.
Grealish will turn 30 in September. Not much of a revelation given he is 29, but it feels notable. To be blunt: he is not a kid anymore.
His career trajectory has never been linear. He was an early starter, starring as a teenager for Aston Villa in an FA Cup semi-final victory over Liverpool, but a relatively late bloomer. It took far longer to begin to flourish consistently once the West Midlands club had stabilised under Dean Smith’s management.
He spent three seasons in the Championship at Villa and didn’t win his first England senior cap until two days before his 25th birthday. He was 26 by the time he made his Champions League debut.
Those questions about his application, his focus and his hunger have dogged him almost every step of the way. There has always been plenty of evidence that he wanted it. But did he want it enough? Did he want it enough day in, day out, week in, week out, season in, season out?
Grealish in action for Aston Villa in the Championship in 2018 (Alex Davidson/Getty Images)
As gifted as he undoubtedly is, talent alone would not have got him through the academy system at Aston Villa. It wouldn’t have seen him emerge as a beacon of hope during a dark period for Villa, the inspiration behind their promotion-winning campaign in 2018-19, or as one of the standout performers in the Premier League over the next two seasons. It wouldn’t have earned him an England call-up, that record-breaking transfer to City or the many trophy successes (including three Premier League titles and a Champions League title) that have followed.
GO DEEPER
Making of Jack Grealish: the great escape with Notts County, Blondie’s ‘Atomic’ and turning down Birmingham City
But those questions about Grealish’s inner drive have never gone away — at least, never for long.
By his own admission, his impact in his first season at City (“playing crap” and “thinking, ‘They’ve paid £100m for me, what have I actually contributed?’”) and his third (“I don’t feel like I performed well this season at all”) fell way short of expectations. Even in a far more impressive second season (2022-23), he did not find his rhythm until well after the halfway stage.
Questions about his motivation were raised by the player himself last season, telling reporters while on England duty that “when you’ve done it (won the treble), it’s kind of like, ‘What now?’ Do you know what I mean?’” — a throwaway line at the time, perhaps, but one that looks more relevant now.
Few players partied harder than Grealish after the treble triumph and none seemed to carry such a hangover into the following campaign. Behind the scenes, there were warnings from Guardiola about the need to train and play with far more intensity. There was a period in early 2024 when Grealish seemed to have fallen right down the pecking order. When he suffered a groin injury 20 minutes into a Champions League match against Copenhagen, Guardiola suggested these things happen when players are “not fit, not fit at all”.
Grealish was at the forefront of City’s treble celebrations in 2023 (Alex Livesey/Getty Images)
But going into the final stages of last season, he was starting some of City’s biggest games, including both legs of the Champions League quarter-final defeat by Real Madrid, the FA Cup semi-final against Chelsea and important Premier League assignments away to Crystal Palace and Nottingham Forest.
A turning point came in early May after City’s players were given three days off after the 5-1 victory over Wolverhampton Wanderers, an opportunity to rest ahead of the last three games in the Premier League title race and the FA Cup final beyond.
When Grealish was left out of the squad for the next game at Fulham, Guardiola claimed it was because the player was unwell. But this followed a severe reprimand from the manager, who felt Grealish’s efforts were way short of the required standard when he returned to training. That he didn’t kick another ball that season — kept on the bench throughout the games against Tottenham and West Ham and even the FA Cup final, with City labouring to defeat against Manchester United — reflected the manager’s unhappiness.
Even as he and his City team-mates celebrated a fourth consecutive Premier League title last May, Grealish told Sky Sports, “I don’t feel like I’ve performed well this season at all” — a view shared by Gareth Southgate, who dropped him from the England squad for the Euro 2024 finals.
Grealish says missing out on Euro 2024 left him “absolutely heartbroken”. Guardiola suggested the disappointment might serve as fuel for Grealish. “Sometimes you need something to ignite yourself to be better,” the City manager told reporters on their pre-season tour of the United States, expressing delight at the player’s focus in the build-up to the new campaign.
But all that pre-season talk feels like a long time ago. Five months have passed and Grealish’s impact has been negligible.
A series of niggling injuries haven’t helped — a lack of rhythm, as Guardiola puts it — but the number of times he has been left on the bench speaks volumes, restricted to brief run-outs in games that have already been won or, more recently, lost.
To revisit footage of Grealish’s final two seasons at Villa is to see a player in his element at his hometown club: thriving as a big fish in a slightly smaller pond, dribbling, twisting, turning, trying the unexpected, embracing the responsibility that came with the captaincy, but still playing with a smile on his face.
That joie de vivre — on and off the pitch, it is fair to say — made him an unusual target for the Guardiola regime at City. The former Barcelona coach adores creative players, but he also demands conformity within a tactical framework. He is less enamoured of those who play at their own speed, on their own terms.
In his final season at Villa, Grealish registered six goals and 10 assists in 26 Premier League appearances. A rate of 0.66 goal contributions per 90 minutes, equivalent to two goals or assists every three games, was remarkable in a team that scored just 55 goals in 38 matches. According to Opta, he was credited with 0.82 goal-creating actions per 90 minutes (defined by Opta as one of the two offensive actions, such as a pass or a successful take-on, leading directly to a goal), the highest of any player in the Premier League.
Those numbers fell significantly in his first season at City. Again, he made 26 Premier League appearances (slightly less playing time), but he registered only three goals and three assists. Even in a team that scored almost twice as many goals as the previous season’s Villa, Grealish’s goal contribution rate fell from 0.66 per 90 minutes to 0.28. His number of goal-creating actions per 90 minutes plummeted, as did the number of times he tried to take on an opponent.
There is an obvious and important caveat: at City, Guardiola doesn’t want him to be a free spirit. He wants him to bring pausa, an intangible quality relating to the ability to slow down and control possession.
Among neutrals, this is regrettable. The star player from a mid-table team reduced to a less glamorous supporting role at a club higher up the food chain. Grealish has also become the most obvious embodiment of what Guardiola’s assistant coach Juanma Lillo (then in charge of Qatari club Al Sadd) wrote about in The Athletic in 2022, lamenting the homogeny of coaching ideas, the death of dribbling and a joyless mantra of “look inside to find spaces outside”.
GO DEEPER
An alternative analysis of the World Cup – by the man who helped shape Guardiola’s City
But while it is undeniable that Guardiola has wanted him to play in a more refined, less spontaneous way than at Villa, pausa was never intended to be to the exclusion of penetration. It was never intended to be either/or, to the exclusion of those decisive contributions in the final third.
When Guardiola calls for a return of “the Jack that won the treble”, he is recalling the version that was most similar to Grealish’s pre-City incarnation. That 2022-23 season was not only his best at City in terms of base-level output (five goals and seven assists in the Premier League), but also the one campaign when he surpassed his Villa level in terms of goal-creating actions (0.9 per 90 minutes) and the frequency with which he tried to dribble past opponents. For the rest of his time at City, he has not come close to those numbers.
The Premier League’s ‘big chances created’ metric is more basic, but the pattern is similar: 14 (behind only Bruno Fernandes and Kevin De Bruyne) in his final season at Villa, followed by five in his first campaign at City, 12 in the treble campaign, then three last season and just two so far this term.
Grealish has scored 11 Premier League goals for City… but none since this effort against Palace in 2023 (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
As much as the data illustrates a sharp drop in his creative output, nothing underlines Grealish’s struggles more than the eye test. He has looked lethargic for the past 12 months, low on energy, low on inspiration. Long before some of his team-mates fell into a slump, he looked like a player who was struggling.
He was one of those whose return from injury, in late November, was expected to galvanise the team. It briefly looked that way when he was unexpectedly given a central-midfield role against Nottingham Forest in early December, using the ball sensibly but effectively and enjoying the opportunity to carry it from deeper areas in a 3-0 win that briefly lifted the gloom over the Etihad Stadium.
But Guardiola — effusive about his performance against Forest — abandoned the experiment a week later after City’s midfield was overrun by Juventus in the Champions League.
Grealish’s only start since then was an unhappy outing on the left wing at Villa Park just before Christmas. He was one of City’s few bright sparks in the first half, but the whole setup looked slow and ponderous — the ball continually floated wide to Grealish, who found himself short of options, lacking the space, the confidence and the turn of pace to beat his former team-mate Matty Cash consistently.
Villa’s supporters revelled in his struggles as the game went on, booing and barracking. He was once their idol, the local boy done good, but not any more — at least not when he is lining up against them.
At the final whistle, he held up three fingers to indicate the three Premier League titles he has won in Manchester. As ripostes go, it was pretty firm.
But as well as what he has won at City, there is a growing focus on what he might have lost. It is clear he has enjoyed being part of a successful team at City — as well as the many associated benefits, not least financial and commercial — but he has admitted at times that his contribution has fallen far short of his and others’ expectations.
GO DEEPER
‘The full package’: How Jack Grealish became the most marketable UK footballer since Beckham
There must be a part of him that looks at Villa’s progress under Unai Emery, particularly some of those thrilling Champions League nights this season, and reflects, however briefly, on what might have been.
Grealish has often looked like one of those maverick talents who might find his greatest fulfilment as the talismanic player in a good team rather than part of the supporting cast in a side with higher aspirations. Lately, as an increasingly peripheral member of a City squad that has run into difficulties, he has looked downright miserable.
Grealish reminding Villa fans how many Premier League titles he has won with City (Mike Egerton/PA Images via Getty Images)
Some of those close to Grealish, speaking on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the situation, say the past year or so has been more challenging for him than anyone realises.
There was a break-in at his home in late 2023 that left him and his family shaken. There have been niggling injuries and a struggle to rediscover his rhythm. There was the blow of rejection by Southgate for Euro 2024. He became a father in September, a special moment in any life, but one that can affect routines as well as outlooks.
They take issue with the popular caricature of “Jack the Lad”, rolling with the punches and shrugging off the setbacks. They say his lack of playing time at City, like his omission from the Euro 2024 squad, has hit him harder than some might imagine.
At the same time, they recognise — as he does — that his performances since the start of last season have not been good enough. Rather than take issue with Guardiola’s comments, they talk of Grealish’s gratitude to his manager and acknowledge his need to work hard and regain his trust.
Feeling loved, feeling trusted and feeling appreciated matters to Grealish. He seemed at his happiest under Smith at Villa. He never felt that trust from Southgate. If having Guardiola’s trust felt like the ultimate endorsement at one stage, things appear less straightforward now.
Grealish enjoyed Lee Carsley’s brief spell as England’s interim coach, scoring in Nations League matches against the Republic of Ireland and Finland in the autumn, but now there is another new manager to convince. Thomas Tuchel might have different ideas for those attacking-midfield or wide roles. He is not short of alternatives.
It all adds to the sense of another high-profile England player with his career at a crossroads. It is nothing as critical as the situation facing Marcus Rashford, desperately seeking a new start after a miserable period at Manchester United, but Grealish has been left in no doubt that the clock is ticking.
Grealish still has two and a half years left on his contract, but that six-year deal, as well as the £100m transfer fee, has long looked like an overindulgence on City’s part.
It is easy to talk about resale value but, as Chelsea discovered with Raheem Sterling last summer and as United are discovering with Rashford, there is not a huge market for English players in their late 20s whose huge salaries have not been backed up by big performances for some time.
It is not easy to see where Grealish will go if he falls surplus to City’s requirements. The long-imagined option of a safe landing back at Villa now feels improbable — less due to bridges being burned (something he has sought to avoid) and more due to the feeling that Villa have moved on.
For now, none of that is on Grealish’s agenda. He wants to return to favour at City and to regain Guardiola’s confidence. Saturday’s FA Cup third-round tie at home to Salford, of League Two, offers the rare prospect of an extended run-out.
But a man-of-the-match performance against Salford or even away to Brentford or Ipswich Town in the Premier League next week might not shift the needle dramatically.
It is no longer about what Grealish is capable of delivering in moments or in single matches. As Guardiola said last weekend: “I know that he can do it because I saw him, I saw him”. It is about breaking that cycle of diminishing returns, week in and week out, and giving everything he has got. Everything.
(Top photo: Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images)
