Rayan Cherki's Masterclass at Selhurst Park

Rayan Cherki didn’t just win a football match at Selhurst Park. He took the place, signed his name across the turf and walked off eight minutes from time having turned Crystal Palace’s ground into his own training pitch.

The numbers only tell part of it. Three shots on target. Three key passes. Three successful dribbles. Twenty-nine ball carries, 2.2 kilometres with the ball at his feet. But they don’t capture the feeling that every time he picked it up, Palace braced for impact.

For 45 minutes, City toiled. The patterns were there, the possession was there, the threat wasn’t. Then Cherki moved through the gears and the whole game changed.

The first goal was pure theatre. Phil Foden slid a pass into him on the edge of the box, and from that moment it was one-against-all. Cherki dipped his shoulder, slalomed past one, then another, then a third defender, the ball glued to his boots as if the pitch belonged to him alone. Just when it looked like he’d overrun it, losing his balance and his angle, he stabbed a finish past Dean Henderson, catching the Palace goalkeeper cold.

That was the moment Selhurst Park realised it was watching something different.

The second owed something to fortune, but only after Cherki had created the stage himself. Again he carved out the space, again he refused the safe option. From 20 yards he let fly, the strike thudding off Chris Richards and spinning beyond Henderson. Harsh on Palace, ruthless from City’s No 10. In five minutes, Cherki turned a contest into a procession.

Jamie Redknapp, watching on for Sky Sports, could barely contain his admiration.

“Rayan Cherki painted a masterpiece,” he said, calling that first goal “incredible” and describing him as “a genius” for what he can do with a football. Redknapp reached for the highest Premier League reference points he could find, likening Cherki’s low centre of gravity and sleight of foot to Eden Hazard, and evoking Georgi Kinkladze, the old City maverick who could “get past people in a telephone box”. The comparison was clear: this was that same rare strain of player, the one who sees tight spaces as invitations, not obstacles.

And the key word Redknapp landed on was the one that now defines Cherki’s City career: freedom.

Under Pep Guardiola, City’s dominance was rooted in control. Cherki’s debut season in Manchester still sparkled on paper – 25 goals and assists combined – but it always felt like there was more waiting to explode. Guardiola used him sparingly: 19 Premier League starts, only four in the Champions League. When he did play, the margins were tight and the instructions tighter.

Stay wide. Hold the zone. Don’t invert too early. Don’t dribble into traffic and disrupt the pattern. Cherki’s natural urge to roam and improvise had to bend to a pre-planned passing grid. Even when he produced something outrageous – the rabona cross for Foden against Sunderland – Guardiola’s response was a lecture on simplicity, invoking Lionel Messi as the model for doing the basics, always.

With that mindset, Cherki was never going to become City’s primary creator. He was a luxury accessory to a machine that already knew exactly how it wanted to move.

Enzo Maresca has torn up that script.

His first major decision was to pull Cherki off the touchline and drop him centrally, right behind Erling Haaland. From there, the Frenchman is encouraged to live in the chaos. Tight spaces are no longer traps but invitations to try something outrageous. Maresca still demands intensity without the ball – Cherki’s diligent work in tracking Adam Wharton against Palace underlined that – but he pays that graft back with trust where it matters most.

Instead of limiting his touches, Maresca wants him to drown in them.

The contrast with Guardiola is stark. The Catalan’s obsession with control reshaped modern football at Barcelona, Bayern and City, but it also spawned a generation of imitators, all chasing the same sterile domination and squeezing the air out of the game’s great free spirits. What we’re seeing now, through Cherki and a handful of others, is a quiet rebellion.

Across Europe, managers are starting to build around the individualist again. At Paris Saint-Germain, Luis Enrique’s fluid structure is designed to isolate Khvicha Kvaratskhelia in one-on-one duels, then let him drift inside when Nuno Mendes charges on. At Bayern Munich, Vincent Kompany gives Michael Olise the licence to float into pockets where he can unpick defences. At Barcelona, Hansi Flick lets Lamine Yamal read the pitch for himself in a vertical, fast-breaking system.

Cherki belongs in that group. A playmaker given permission to be a playmaker, not a cog.

Against Palace, that philosophy looked vindicated. He still pressed, still tracked, still respected the collective. Yet when the ball came to him in the final third, there was no visible leash. He was allowed to risk the dribble, to take on the shot, to ignore the obvious pass if he sensed something better.

It doesn’t work every time. It doesn’t need to. What City need from him is exactly what he delivered at Selhurst Park: the ability to rip open games that threaten to drift, to turn sterile pressure into something opponents can’t live with.

For all Guardiola’s achievements and his insistence that football is best played as a perfectly executed plan, Cherki’s form under Maresca is a reminder of a simpler truth. The sport still belongs, at its heart, to the showmen who can turn a tight match into a canvas.

City have one of those now, fully unleashed. The only real question is how far this version of Cherki can drag them.