From Haaland to Núñez, big six’s striking rejigs raise more questions than answers

Can a team be too perfect? Could it be that if you have technically brilliant players in every position who have fully assimilated into a slickly intelligent system, the result is not a remorseless winning machine but a slightly cold entity so fixated on order that when disruption comes it is unable to cope?

In the aftermath of last season’s the Champions League exit against Real Madrid, Pep Guardiola dismissed suggestions that his team could not handle adversity, that crisis could send his sophisticated mechanisms haywire. But it is at the very least intriguing that City’s two highest-profile recent signings, Jack Grealish and Erling Haaland, are both disruptors who do not seem a natural fit for his precisely ordered universe.

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As City look to make it five Premier League titles in six seasons, a level of dominance in English football achieved only twice before, by Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United between 1995-96 and 2000-01 and Liverpool’s run from 1978-79 to 1983-84, Haaland is this summer’s most significant signing. His arrival, though, is part of a more general picture of the key challengers tweaking their attacking options. Of the Big Six, only Manchester United are yet to sign a forward but the Cristiano Ronaldo saga could result in a major change to their front line.

Haaland is a risk. He is clearly a footballer of astonishing potential, one of those outsized forwards who crop up infrequently and for a time make the game seem laughably simple. He has scored 78 league goals over the past three seasons; he himself has spoken of watching City and imagining how many goals he would score just like the one he got 12 minutes into his first