Man City pre-season tour omens should concern Liverpool and Chelsea

If Premier League managers had their way, they would not travel the globe in summer to prepare for the upcoming season.

The football department is outgunned by the commercial team on pre-season tours, with the squad sent thousands of miles to maintain and grow the fanbase and partners — while playing whichever teams happen to be around, whatever the conditions. Give Pep Guardiola the choice and he would surely rather have another week or two in Barcelona, but if a tour is unavoidable then the United States is about as good as it gets.

That may seem a generalisation for such a huge space, and it's true that some places are better than others; the regular sprinklers and ice baths as Manchester City trained on Sunday in Houston were a sign of the scorching temperatures. However, the fact that those cooling facilities are on offer are a reflection of how good so many facilities are across the giant country.

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The depth of professional sport across the US means that it is easy to find a training centre that has both everything needed to cope with the conditions, and also the room to work peacefully and privately away from prying eyes. Some extra heat and commercial duties are not too high a price to pay in those circumstances.

Guardiola, who spent a year in New York on sabbatical between the Barcelona and Bayern Munich jobs, has a poor poker face at times and has not hidden either his satisfaction at US tours, or his misery at going to the Far East. City arrived late to Shanghai in 2019 because of plane failure on their last big trip and when they did get there, the manager snapped that they were only interested in surviving the conditions