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In summer 2024, Nico O'Reilly was a teenager on a private training camp in Quinta do Lago, Portugal, alongside fellow elite youngsters James McAtee, Liam Delap, Tyler Morton and Micah Hamilton. He was yet to make his Manchester City senior debut and had never played at left-back.

Last summer, O'Reilly was working once again in a private capacity with technical skills coach Dean Brathwaite, having enjoyed a breakthrough season at City in an unfamiliar position. But the focus was on developing O'Reilly's prowess in his natural position of attacking central midfield. City had signed Rayan Ait-Nouri from Wolves, so he wouldn't be playing at left-back again.

This summer, O'Reilly has been nominated for the PFA and Premier League Young Player of the Season awards. He has winners' medals from the Carabao and FA Cups, having scored both goals to down Arsenal in the former showpiece. Squad number 3, the 21-year-old is almost certainly going to begin the World Cup as the starting left-back for Thomas Tuchel's England.

MORE: FIFA World Cup schedule 2026: Complete match dates, times, team fixtures

"It's been a bit of a mad year for him," Brathwaite told The Sporting News over coffee recently. Professional soccer players in England using specialist coaches such as Brathwaite, the founder of the thriving Bee Inspired Football Academy in Manchester, has surged since the coronavirus pandemic, and his sessions proved a word-of-mouth hit with City youth graduates such as McAtee and Delap, who now play for Nottingham Forest and Chelsea respectively. 

O'Reilly did not come with the same buzz as other products off the Etihad Campus conveyor belt, and Brathwaite confessed to not really knowing much about the rangy midfielder who had a first session with him while playing for City's under-16s. They didn't hit it off straight away.

🇵🇹⚽️ @oreilly_nico 🤝🏾 #mancity pic.twitter.com/zGvb2S4qce— Dean (@Coach_DB__) June 22, 2024

"He was obviously a very good player, but I was a little bit critical in terms of some of his detail," he explained. "I didn't know whether Nico maybe wasn't used to having someone pull him up on certain things. He came for a session and then I probably didn't see him for six months.

"It wasn't bad stuff. Obviously, he was growing quickly, so he was a little bit stiff [in his movement] to an extent, but not massively. I'm just really critical of detail. I wanted to work on his footwork and his movement a little bit more. 

"His ball striking was nice, and I didn't want it to be nice because he's a big lad. I wanted it to be… horrible. I wanted his shot power to go up and for him to punch through the ball, be more ruthless. Those would have been some of the things that I pulled him up on at the time."

When did Nico O'Reilly make his Man City debut?

After their relationship gelled and O'Reilly honed his talents on the retreat in the Algarve, he returned to training with City and was elevated to Pep Guardiola's first team for the 2024/25 season. A debut in the Community Shield clash with Manchester United at Wembley, which City won on penalties, was followed by a couple of starts in the Carabao Cup and a substitute cameo versus Sparta Prague in the Champions League. Then, before an FA Cup third-round encounter with Salford City in January 2025, Guardiola had one of his brainwaves.

“It was a bit of a surprise,” O'Reilly recalled. “I think it was just one session [at left-back] before the Salford game, [Guardiola] said, ‘right, you're playing there tomorrow’."

O'Reilly opened the scoring in an 8-0 rout and scored a brace in round five against Plymouth Argyle. He kept his place all through the competition, up to and including the 1-0 final defeat to Crystal Palace. Guardiola was particularly taken by O'Reilly's physically imposing presence on the field. From trailblazer Phil Foden, through to Rico Lewis and McAtee, City's academy has specialised in producing highly skilled but diminutive technicians. Here was O'Reilly, with all that schooling inside the frame and athletic prowess of an Olympic decathlete.

“He’s not a typical player from the academy because they are all small and have big talent, but he has a big, big presence,” Guardiola said after O'Reilly scored twice in a 3-1 FA Cup win over Plymouth Argyle in March 2025. The youngster also showed his knack for goals with important strikes in the wins over Everton and Palace in the Premier League, as City recovered from a mid-season slump to qualify for the Champions League.

He now has a showreel of those moments, almost all from left-back. The long-term plan remains for O'Reilly to be a midfield star under Guardiola's City successor, but he has variously been described as a cheat code and a unicorn this season — defending his own penalty area with the presence of a centre-back and crashing into the opposition box with the hunger and intent of a cold-blooded forward.

Pep Guardiola's tactics with full-backs

After seeing the likes of Fabian Delph and Oleksandr Zinchenko tuck inside as secondary holding midfielders and Joao Cancelo roam into more advanced inside positions from either flank, O'Reilly flourishing at City felt like the final evolution of Guardiola's full-back experiments. He wasn't inverting into central midfield but almost as an auxiliary forward. However, a source close to the departed City coach told the Sporting News that O'Reilly's star-making performances owe more to his natural talent and confidence than any great feat of Catalan puppet mastery.

"I don’t think it’s a tactical innovation from Pep, in his long career of innovations regarding full-backs," they said. "It is more a case of deploying an extraordinary player at full-back – a player who ought to be playing in midfield, but who performs better when starting further back on the wing, eventually covering the whole pitch and acting as both defender and attacker at the same time. He is a prodigy."

Ait-Nouri began the season as a more conventional full-back option, but an injury meant O'Reilly started last September's Manchester derby at left-back and excelled against Bryan Mbeumo as City won 3-1. He has not looked back. A month later, he made an England debut in his new position. Thomas Tuchel was eager to have a look at a full-back talent quite unlike anything else at his disposal.

"What Guardiola has done exceptionally well over the past decade is seeing traits that people have, but then not putting them in the obvious place," former City and Real Salt Lake defender Nedum Onuoha told The Sporting News.

"As a consequence, it becomes quite hard for people to understand how to play against them. Nico, feet-wise. He's very, very good, super comfortable on the ball, so you can put him in any position on the pitch and you know it's like he can receive it. He's also got the physicality of being 6ft 4ins, and he can be aggressive in terms of how he wants to defend. 

"Compared to the likes of Zinchenko and Delph, when he's playing that inverted full-back role, he's comfortable getting higher because he was a No. 10. That's why you find him getting into the box so much more than those guys, or Cancelo, did previously. They'd be more ball-players from behind the play. 

"Nico ends up being a player who's very comfortable ahead of the play. So he's essentially a defender when he's defending, but when the team has the ball, he's one of the best attackers that the team has as well."

MORE: SN 140: Ranking the 11 greatest FIFA World Cup tournaments by an individual player

Will Nico O'Reilly play left-back for England at the World Cup?

The pragmatism baked into international tournament soccer means it's a common assumption that O'Reilly might have those wings clipped a little. At the same time, while Tuchel has become an instinctively more cautious coach than Guardiola, he has shown plenty of flexibility and a capacity to innovate. Also, if he wanted a properly conventional left-back, perhaps he'd have actually picked one.

"He's been given the freedom to go from left-back into midfield and I think, in the early stages of the competition, you'll see him doing more of that if he's selected," former England captain Alan Shearer told a pre-World Cup media call organised by the Premier League. "And I think he will be selected. He's had a brilliant season, he's been outstanding.

"He was one of Man City's best players, and when you consider the list of players in that team and what they've achieved, it tells you how well he's done. What a way to cap it off it would be, to go out and play most, if not all the games for England in this tournament and stand out as well. It wouldn't surprise me. I think he's that good."

O'Reilly has truly thrived with a natural winger pinning the opposition full-back this season, dovetailing particularly effectively with Jeremy Doku. Ait-Nouri was a better fit as an overlapping option on the odd occasions Omar Marmoush started as the left-sided attacker for City, given the Egypt international's natural inclination to cut inside. When Doku played, that was the space O'Reilly occupied, underlapping deep into opposition territory and goalscoring positions.

Given all the indications that Tuchel will tailor this England team around captain Harry Kane, with wide attackers such as Marcus Rashford, Anthony Gordon, Bukayo Saka and Noni Madueke stretching the pitch, and getting beyond the Bayern Munich superstar when he drops deep, no one should crowd the areas where O'Reilly likes to roam. Look out for him adding an extra prong to the attack, surging onto one of Kane's signature through balls.

    View this post on Instagram           A post shared by 𝔻𝕖𝕒𝕟 𝔹𝕣𝕒𝕥𝕙𝕨𝕒𝕚𝕥𝕖 (@deanbrath)

Whether or not England expects, Brathwaite certainly does. 

"I think he gets a World Cup goal. I think he gets an important goal," he added.  "There's just not anyone like him from that left back position. I can't see how teams set up to think about how they need to defend him. He just arrives and, all of a sudden, you're like, 'Who's not followed him in here?' The manager isn't going to set up and plan to stop the left-back crashing the box."

Since his departure from City was confirmed, there have been countless articles and conversations lauding Guardiola's contributions to English football. A month or so from now, maybe the left-back crashing the box will be his most celebrated gift of all.

Dom Farrell

Dom is a senior content producer. He previously worked as fan brands editor for Manchester City at Reach Plc. Prior to that, he built more than a decade of experience in the sports journalism industry, primarily for the Stats Perform and Press Association news agencies. Dom has covered major football events on location, including the entirety of Euro 2016 and the 2018 World Cup in Paris and St Petersburg respectively, along with numerous high-profile Premier League, Champions League and England international matches. Cricket and boxing are his other major sporting passions and he has covered the likes of Anthony Joshua, Tyson Fury, Wladimir Klitschko, Gennadiy Golovkin and Vasyl Lomachenko live from ringside.

Source: Sporting News