Antoine Semenyo Is Quietly Becoming Indispensable at Manchester City

Six months ago, Antoine Semenyo was a £62.5 million gamble, a January signing brought in mid-title-race by Pep Guardiola to add pace and directness to a Manchester City side chasing silverware on four fronts. Guardiola has since left the Etihad, replaced by Enzo Maresca ahead of this season, and City have been rebuilt around a new voice in the dressing room. What hasn't changed is Semenyo's place in the side. If anything, it's grown.

Through City's opening Premier League fixtures of 2026/27, Semenyo has started every match, playing all 360 minutes on offer and recording two assists. He still hasn't scored in the league this season. It hasn't mattered much, because increasingly, what he does without the ball matters just as much as what he does with it.

Two assists, two very different performances

Semenyo's first Premier League contribution of the campaign came in City's 4-1 win away at Crystal Palace on August 28, a match that carried a little extra weight given Palace had beaten City in the FA Cup final only months earlier. Erling Haaland scored twice that afternoon, but it was Semenyo's cross that set up City's opener, the kind of contribution that doesn't always make the headlines but changes the shape of a game.

A week later, at home to newly promoted Coventry City, Semenyo did it again, teeing up the only goal of the match. Haaland, who finished the chance, didn't hold back afterward, calling his new teammate "the perfect Premier League player",  physical, direct, "the whole total package," in the striker's words, adding with a smile that Semenyo reminded him a bit of himself.

Maresca has been just as direct in his praise, crediting Semenyo's cross for the opener at Palace and his assist for the winner against Coventry as evidence of a player doing "everything that's being asked of him in and out of possession." It's a notable vote of confidence for a manager still just months into the job, publicly naming Semenyo,  alongside new captain Marc Guéhi,  as one of City's senior players, despite the Ghanaian having arrived at the club barely eight months ago.

Contributing even when the final ball doesn't come

Semenyo's most recent league outing may have been his most instructive, even without a goal or assist attached to it. In City's 1-0 derby win over Manchester United on September 13, he started on the left and played the full ninety minutes, using his pace to get in behind United's defensive line before delivering a low cross that deflected out for a corner. It wasn't a moment that shows up prominently in a stat sheet. But it was exactly the kind of running that stretches a defence and keeps a fullback honest for ninety minutes, even on days when the end product doesn't quite arrive.

That willingness to keep working in games where the numbers won't reflect it is, by most accounts, becoming one of the more valued parts of his game at City, evidence that his early involvement isn't just a hot streak but a habit Maresca can build a system around.

A different role than the one he had at Bournemouth

At Bournemouth, Semenyo was often the player City's opponents built their game plan around stopping, the one expected to shoulder a heavy share of the attacking responsibility, and he delivered, finishing his final full season on the south coast with numbers that made him one of the most feared attackers outside the Premier League's traditional top six. Between his time at Bournemouth and City combined last season, he scored 17 goals and provided four assists in 37 appearances.

City is a different environment entirely. He's no longer the focal point by necessity; he's one of several international-calibre attackers competing for a starting shirt in a team built to dominate possession and control games through patient, precise build-up. That he has nonetheless started every league match so far this season, ahead of established options in a squad that cost hundreds of millions to assemble, says something about how quickly he's adapted to what's being asked of him.

Why it matters beyond Manchester

For Ghana, Semenyo's continued rise at the highest level of English football is significant in its own right. Regular Premier League and Champions League minutes at a club competing on every front sharpen a player in ways that domestic football simply can't, and Semenyo has become one of the Black Stars' most important attacking outlets in the process, a player capable of stretching a defence and creating from wide areas at international level too.

The goals, for now, haven't followed him to City the way they did at Bournemouth. But if his start to this season is any guide, that may simply be a matter of when rather than if. In the meantime, Semenyo's value to Maresca's Manchester City is already showing up clearly enough elsewhere on the pitch, in a cross that becomes a goal, a run that draws a corner, and a manager willing to call him, eight months into his time at the club, one of the senior players in the room.