Eighteen hours after a needlessly dramatic last-minute win over Leeds last November, John Stones ambled out at Manchester City‘s training complex with Matheus Nunes firmly in his sights.
What might appear an unlikely friendship was forged in wanting to make others laugh. Nunes started most of his days by attempting to get under the skin of Stones at breakfast. Or, in his own words, ‘p*** John off’.
So when the Portuguese had been severely at fault for a Dominic Calvert-Lewin goal that launched an improbable comeback, rectifying one mistake from full back only to then lose possession inside his own box in dizzying fashion, Stones saw his opportunity to exact some revenge.
Sources say in that warm down session, the centre half mercilessly mocked his great mate for a comical part in the goal. Nunes had to just take it.
Stones felt safe doing that for two reasons: City won the game via Phil Foden in stoppage time and, more importantly, Nunes had felt a sense of belonging at right back for some time prior.
He had not been able to accept being shifted there by Pep Guardiola for six long months in 2025. He could have left the club.
Matheus Nunes has transitioned from a midfielder to a right back at Manchester City
But once the Leeds gaffe came around, the 27-year-old was already comfortable in his new skin – any mental fragility gone – and now he heads into this Premier League as Enzo Maresca’s first choice. This comes after those closest to him had to cajole him into believing in a reimagined destiny while at his lowest ebb.
‘When I was playing as a winger, Bernardo [Silva] would call me Thierry Henry,’ Nunes says. ‘Then I played as a full back and he called me Cafu.
‘Bernardo and Ruben [Dias] were so annoying all the time, they were in my head constantly: ‘You were good there, you were good there. You need to accept it.’ And I was like, no, no, no, all the time.
‘I always told my friends that I wasn’t a full back. At a certain point you just have to see what the people are saying. You can’t be denying it for the rest of your life. If you do, maybe you miss your chance. Now I feel like a full back.’
Nunes struggled to countenance the switch from central midfield, where he had excelled at Wolves. During the process of shifting him into defence Pep Guardiola once said that Nunes wasn’t ‘clever enough’ to feature in the middle for City – comments he privately clarified with the player a day later.
The integration was not easy, Nunes in and out, bruised by mistakes during a derby defeat too – one of them glaring, under-hitting a back pass and then barging Amad over to concede a penalty in blind panic.
‘Individually I would say this is probably the most difficult game,’ he adds. ‘In my head after the game… when you do mistakes as a midfielder, you would never affect the game like that one. I did one mistake and it led to a goal, and then you end up losing the game and that’s all you think in your head, you know?
‘But it was not only that, it was me coming from a place where it was uncomfortable for me, a position where it was uncomfortable for me, not being able to accept it, because I wasn’t accepting it. In my head, it was ‘I’m not a full-back. I’m not a full-back’. That’s all I was thinking about.
‘I think in the Club World Cup, my mindset started to change. Oh, I can actually play good. I had maybe three or four games in a row and then the beginning of last season I started playing every single game. Then your head just flips and you can see it through.’
Nunes saw a psychologist during that transition and Guardiola ended up revealing that he observed elite potential in him as a defender. ‘If I didn’t change my mindset I would never have played good there and he would never have said stuff like that. He probably said that because he started to see what others couldn’t see.
‘Then actually seeing Pep during training, the way he believed in me, I felt there was a bit of a difference in the way that we interacted with each other. This stuff, you just feel it, it’s not something that I can explain. And once you start seeing all of this stuff, it changes the mindset. It was not easy, of course, but I had a decision to make: do I want to play or do I not want to play? And I wanted to play.’
Nunes begins to become emotional when Guardiola’s exit is raised. He talks about the video montage shown to players and staff – of Guardiola’s speeches and moments with the squad across a decade – when the manager officially announced his departure to the room.
Nunes offered a new insight into Guardiola’s departure and said it was still difficult to talk about
‘A lot of people were crying,’ Nunes says. ‘Pep held it together. He just wanted to get it over [quickly]. It became real that he was actually leaving. It’s difficult to talk about.
‘It’s very hard to say goodbye to someone who gave so much to us all. Someone who put the club to a level that seems unreachable again. What he did was unbelievable. A lot of things are going to change. I’ve never been in the club without him. It’s never easy to say goodbye.’
Adding Silva and Stones into that equation has made it a sombre summer for Nunes specifically.
‘Huge losses,’ he says. ‘If you look at it, John was a very important figure in the club. He was always a joker. The three of us were. I’m just being myself, and then I end up being a clown sometimes. What’s the point of life if you’re not having a laugh?’
