As Roberto Mancini declared himself sick of waiting for Alexis Sanchez, Emmanuel Adebayor was ruling himself out of moves to Paris Saint Germain and Blackburn.

One player won’t come to City, another is proving hard to shift. It sums up a frustrating start to the summer at Eastlands. But it is, perhaps, a signal of the increasingly tough approach the club are taking in the transfer market.

Mancini, though, is still impatient for progress. In five glorious days in mid-May, the Blues secured a Champions League spot and then ended their long, long wait for a trophy by lifting the FA Cup.

Then it got even better, as Mancini’s men pounced on Arsenal’s late-season stumbles to claim third place in the Premier League, avoiding a tricky Champions League play-off and passing straight into the lucrative group stages.

The hope was that this would ease City’s passage as they looked to strengthen their squad. As the theory went, top-name players who couldn’t be tempted to Eastlands when the club could offer nothing more than Europa League football would now be more amenable to talking.

Mancini almost acknowledged as much himself, a couple of days before the end of the season, when he declared that he wanted the bulk of transfer business completed before the start of pre-season training. “That is imperative, because pre-season is really important,” he said at the time. “I think that we had some problems this year because we didn’t do a full pre-season with all the players.

“We had players arriving back from the World Cup five days before the start of the Premier League season.

Struggles

“Having all of the players in by July 5 or 6, when we start pre-season, will be very important.”

Pre-season training starts for the Blues at Carrington next week. And ,while the club have worked extraordinarily hard to get in the players they want, progress has been difficult – arguably even more difficult than it was 12 months ago.

City had their transfer struggles then, too. There were the stops and starts of Mario Balotelli’s drawn-out move from Inter Milan – finally completed two days before the start of the season.

And there was the saga of James Milner’s switch from Aston Villa, which dragged on in public for three months as City tried to agree a transfer fee and exasperated the midfielder so much that, at one stage, he threatened to pull out of the deal if it wasn’t sorted quickly.

But last summer, the Blues had managed to make significant moves in the market by the end of June. Jerome Boateng’s arrival from Hamburg was confirmed on June 5, five days before the World Cup started, while David Silva’s move from Valencia was effectively tied up by the end of the month.

This year, Sanchez was the No 1 target. But while Udinese are keen to do a deal with City, the Chilean winger isn’t, instead stating a preference for Barcelona.

Another City target, Brazilian wonderkid Neymar, also looks more likely to end up in Spain, with Barca and Real Madrid looking to sign him.

Mancini is looking to strengthen in defence as well as attack, and has made moves to bring in 20-year-old Montenegro international centre-back Stefan Savic from Partizan Belgrade, who is valued at around £7m.
Contenders
So far this summer, though, no new arrivals have been confirmed. In part, that is because City do not need to strengthen as much as in recent summers, which saw chunks of Sheikh Mansour’s fortune spent on transforming a mid-table

Premier League side into Champions League contenders.

That, coupled with a need to cut spending to meet UEFA’s incoming financial fair play guidelines – designed to stop clubs splashing out money they haven’t earned – has seen City chief executive Garry Cook and football operations officer Brian Marwood take a much tougher stance in the transfer market.

In the past, the Blues have undoubtedly paid over the odds to get players. This summer, they are not playing that game. A refusal to pay inflated prices was a factor in halting a deal for Bolton centre-back Gary Cahill, now destined instead for a £17m move to Arsenal. But as far as the club are concerned, the message has to be clear:
City may be rich, but they’re no soft touches.

That hardline stance is also being taken with regard to the shifting out of players, which will come under the watch of new football operations department arrival John Williams, the former Blackburn chairman.

Twelve months ago, City’s bloated squad was threatening to become an embarrassment. A little over two weeks before the start of last season, the Blues had 33 senior players to fit into a 25-man Premier League squad.

In the end, a host of fringe players were shipped out in August and January, including several on loan. In the case of some of those loanees, such as Craig Bellamy, Wayne Bridge and Roque Santa Cruz, City agreed  to continue paying a significant part of their salaries just to get a deal done.

Such arrangements are off the menu for the Blues now as they attempt to become leaner and meaner.

Some fringe players – such as Bellamy and Shaun Wright-Phillips – are helping things along by indicating they are ready to take a big pay cut to make a move happen.
But even then, finding the right club is not proving easy.

And so there is every chance that Adebayor, Bellamy Wright-Phillips, Santa Cruz and Bridge will be re-united at pre-season training next week.
Mancini can only hope that July proves a more fruitful month than June.