Man City are about to do something they haven't done for eight years - and it unleashes dream partnership

The last time Manchester City signed a left-back ready to go straight into the first team, Rayan Ait Nouri had just turned 16 and was trying to make the grade at Ligue 1 strugglers Angers.

While City had splashed out £52million on Benjamin Mendy, a year earlier, Ait-Nouri had swapped Paris FC for Angers in a deal worth €5,000, which is what the Parisian club had spent on his tuition fees.

It proved to be money well spent, and although Ait-Nouri's trajectory hasn't been as smooth as it looked when he broke into the Angers team as an 18-year-old, he is now on the brink of that move to an elite club that had long been expected.

When he arrives at the Etihad, Ait-Nouri will arrive not just with the expectation of replicating his Wolves performances in a City shirt, but in finally filling a position that hasn't always been the simplest to solve for Pep Guardiola.

Mendy's last City appearance came in August 2021, and Guardiola has tried plenty of alternatives, with varying degrees of success. Josko Gvardiol has filled the role for a couple of years and done so impressively, although his long-term home was always likely to be in the centre of defence.

Joao Cancelo and Oleksandr Zinchenko have also had long stints at left-back, while cut-price deals for potential long-term successors in Angelino and Sergio Gomez didn't work out, with those deals worth around £16million failing to find a first-team starter.

Perhaps the closest City came to signing a left-back was in the summer of 2022, when they pursued Marc Cucurella from Brighton but decided against matching Chelsea's astronomical £62million bid. They also considered Ait-Nouri that summer.

Now the Algerian international is set to arrive at the Etihad, with the £33.7million