Pep Guardiola has suggested that Manchester City is not going into the season while the club wants to discharge players before the transfer window closes.
City – who have 31 senior players in their books – are friendly to a friendly with Palermo on Saturday evening without Jack Grealish, Stefan Ortega and James McATEE – who will all leave in the coming weeks.
Everton is one of the enthusiastic about Grealish, with Nottingham Forest who leads the race for McATee, while Guardiola makes doubts about how much influence Rodri can have in the opening weeks of the campaign.
“We need a little bit (fewer numbers),” said Guardiola. 'I don't like (many) players. Many players have to leave.
'The transfer window moves a lot and many things will happen. We will see what happens and how we deal with it. We will treat it as well as possible.
'The good mood is free to what we lived at the Club World Cup. Maybe we missed some friendly games to prepare and arrive a little better the first three games against Wolves, Spurs and Brighton, but we had to rest and decided to make more training sessions than playing games. '
Rodri, Phil Foden and Josko Gvardiol are not in Italy for the second of a preseason of two games, where the trio is all not considered completely fit.
Rodri is training again with the team, but the lies problem that was picked up during the defeat of the club World Cup by Al Hilal has carefully seen the city with his comeback.
Guardiola predicts that the Ballon d'Or winner will only be relaxed again and may only be correctly available for after the international break in September.
“Rodri gets better, but he had a big injury in the last game against Al Hilal,” Guardiola added. 'He has trained better in recent days, hopefully after the international break is when he will really be fit.
'Hopefully he can play for a few minutes in these early games, but what is important, he is not in pain because we don't want Rodri to come back injured. We try desperate to avoid that. It is not ready for 90 minutes. '