Enzo Maresca’s appointment as Manchester City first-team manager highlights the interesting role that kickstarted his coaching career — taking charge of the club’s under-23s team.It is a position Patrick Vieira held before his spells as first-team boss at Crystal Palace, Strasbourg and Genoa, and one that will welcome a new incumbent this season because Ben Wilkinson is leaving after two years in that job to become a first-team assistant coach at Derby County of the second-tier Championship.He will be replaced by City Under-18s coach Oliver Reiss, who has led that team since 2024, when Wilkinson moved up from the under-18s to the under-23s, a group known at the club as the Elite Development Squad.Maresca was initially recommended to City’s then director of football Txiki Begiristain by Manuel Pellegrini, their first-team manager from 2013-16. He had played for Pellegrini at Spanish side Malaga and later worked under him as a coach at West Ham United.Begiristain, in turn, championed Maresca to City’s academy when it came to the recruitment process for the EDS role, and felt it may be possible he would one day work alongside first-team manager Pep Guardiola, and possibly replace him.The Italian was considered by far the outstanding candidate for the under-23s job, partly because of how he displayed a winning mentality and partly because of his dedication to learning about football, which involved studying current trends by maintaining countless different folders on his laptop.He soon struck up a relationship with Guardiola and, during the Covid-19 pandemic, where government rules only allowed for people to interact within certain ‘bubbles’, the two spent plenty of time together at the training ground, exchanging thoughts on tactics, with their teams deploying similar ideas, such as the right-back moving inside and advancing all the way into the attack, as Joao Cancelo did for Guardiola in the 2020-21 season.How to become a football analystJon MackenzieAfter Maresca departed for his first senior coaching role, a short-lived spell at Parma back in his home country, City hired Brian Barry-Murphy, which was notable as he had already managed at senior level with Rochdale of League One, English football’s third division. He and Maresca had different approaches that yielded similar results: Maresca was more team-oriented, which in turn improved players, while Barry-Murphy focused on improving the players first.Not that Maresca did not focus on the players; during his time as EDS coach, the youngsters at the club were said to hang on his every word, partly thanks to his ability to break the game down in a way that was easy to understand — among those who played a lot were Romeo Lavia, Liam Delap and James McAtee — and when he returned to the club as Guardiola’s assistant following that stint as Parma head coach, he did extra training with academy sides after first-team sessions, something that still sticks in the mind of those involved to this day.Enzo Maresca, centre, celebrates City’s EDS winning Premier League 2 in 2021 (Naomi Baker/Getty Images)Barry-Murphy left after the 2023-24 season (he became Cardiff City head coach a year later and led them to promotion into the Championship) and was replaced by Wilkinson, son of former Sheffield Wednesday, Leeds United and England manager Howard Wilkinson.