Mateo Kovacic on Manchester City's Title Pressure

Mateo Kovacic knows exactly where the crosshairs are pointing this season – straight at Manchester City.

The Croatian midfielder has admitted the champions-in-waiting are under heavy pressure to reclaim a Premier League title that has slipped from their grasp for the past two campaigns, and he did so with the added intrigue of his own uncertain future in a post-Pep Guardiola world.

City’s four-year stranglehold on the league was broken first by Liverpool, then by Arsenal. Two years, two different winners, and suddenly the aura of inevitability around the Etihad has thinned. The rest of the league can smell opportunity. Inside City’s camp, the stakes feel very different.

“I think the pressure is on everybody … on us especially, because we haven’t won it two years in a row,” Kovacic told the South China Morning Post.

No dressing. No excuses. Just the blunt reality from a player who has lived inside title races at the very top.

The context around him only sharpens that sense of urgency. Chelsea, the club he left in 2023 after five years at Stamford Bridge, have gone back to their familiar habit of spending aggressively, throwing money at the squad in an attempt to crash the title conversation again. Kovacic has watched his old employers reload and liked what he has seen.

“Clubs are spending a lot. Chelsea’s one of them, and I think they added some great players,” he said, acknowledging the scale of the challenge building around City.

Arsenal, too, are not standing still. Mikel Arteta has been clear about the club’s stance in this window, describing the Gunners as “very active [in our player search] trying to improve and evolve”. They have already shown they can last the distance in a title race; now they are trying to upgrade again, not just to chase City but to stay ahead of them.

This is the landscape City walk into: Liverpool retooled, Arsenal emboldened, Chelsea spending, and the champions of England suddenly cast as the hunters rather than the hunted. For a squad conditioned to domination, that shift bites.

Kovacic framed it in the simplest possible terms. “Big clubs are about winning, so you always feel the same pressure.” At City, that pressure now comes with an extra layer. Guardiola’s departure, when it comes, will mark the end of one of English football’s defining eras. Kovacic could not guarantee he would be there when that first season without the Catalan begins.

That uncertainty only adds to the edge of the coming campaign. City are fighting not just for another title, but to prove that their grip on English football has not loosened for good – and to make sure the Guardiola era does not fade out, but roars to a close.