Man City, as bad as us?

In my opinion, Man City need just as much surgery as we do, if not more and Pep will be walking into his hardest job yet.

City have a couple of special players, De Bruyne, Aguero & Silva (not been at his best this season due to injuries) similarly to us, with the likes of Martial, De Gea and Smalling, but they also have a lot of average squad players like ourselves too.

They have a back four that looks suspect without Kompany in it, Zabaleta isn't the same tigerish full back as he once was, and you could argue that they don't have a quality left back neither. This is a massive area for them to address and try and get right this summer as they've already thrown a lot of money at it without seeing much return on it. We at least have a solid enough defence, with Smalling and Blind starting to form an impressive partnership, we have Shaw to return, but could do with a reliable right back.

In midfield, Fernandinho, Toure, Delph & Fernando are hardly what you would call Pep midfielders in terms of ability in possession. I think he could find uses for Fernandinho who I rate as a good solid midfielder, but they really need a midfielder to compliment him or if Pep doesn't rate his options, he may decide he needs a couple of reinforcements.

Gundogan has suffered another set back but he would be perfect for them and I cannot fathom why we haven't competed for him too. Despite signing a few midfielders ourselves, there is still huge question marks hanging over that area for us, and we need to figure out how we want to operate our midfield going forwards. I think we will sign Renato Sanches, but we could really do with replacing Carrick too, which is extremely difficult, as there aren't many realistic alternatives out there who are similar in style and ability. Blind could do that role but we would be foolish to disrupt the defence, and as the old saying goes, if it ain't broke don't fix it.

We both could do with a quality wide player to add some creative spark and we both have an exciting young forward in our ranks, Kelechi (easier to spell than his surname) and Rashford, who will hopefully be vital members again next season.

I really do think that us and City are in similar positions at the moment, and that has been further emphasised by the fact we are both fighting against one another to secure CL football, and we both need to be really shrewd this summer in the choices we make to turn our teams into title challengers next season and beyond.